Rae Bareli Sadar: One family bastion since 1993

Rae Bareli (UP): Whether it was represented by the Congress, the Peace Party or by someone aligned with the BJP, the Rae Bareli (Sadar) seat -- for almost three decades now -- has remained within one family: that of late Akhilesh Singh. His electoral juggernaut started in 1993, when he won on the Congress ticket.

He repeated the performance in 1996 and 2002 also but then his relations with the Congress soured. The party expelled him, and he fought the 2007 election as an independent, defeating a Congress candidate by 76,603 votes. By the next elections he had joined the Peace Party and won the 2012 polls with 75,588 votes.

According to his 2012 election affidavit, Akhilesh Singh had been accused in eight criminal cases including one case each of murder and extortion, and five of intimidation. After Singh retired from active politics, his daughter Aditi Singh was elected as the Congress MLA in 2017. Singh died of cancer in August 2019 and his daughter switched to the BJP in November 2021. She sent her resignation letter to her party and the Assembly Speaker last month.

This signalled the final severing of ties between the Singh family and the Congress, which had for long been the dominant force in Rae Bareli since the days of Indira Gandhi. Rae Bareli assembly segment is part of the parliamentary seat held by Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Last week, Aditi Singh (34) made an emotional appeal to voters, launching on social media a short documentary of her father, focusing on his "rich legacy", in a bid to win a second term for herself and the first for the BJP from the seat. During the past few weeks, while she had declared allegiance to the BJP, technically the seat didn't shift to that party.

"His relation with people was such that no equation could cut him off from people. Whichever party had a wave in UP, Rae Bareli would choose Akhilesh Singh only," the documentary says.