Are they going to, or not? Priyanka in Rae Bareli, Rahul in Amethi

There is a lot of conjecture that the Gandhi siblings Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who are running for office in Amethi and Rae Bareli, respectively, in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, will be discussed during the Central Election Committee (CEC) meeting of the Congress on Thursday.

Priyanka should make her electoral debut from Rai Bareli, which was left vacant by her mother and Congress Parliamentary Party leader Sonia Gandhi, while Rahul Gandhi should run from Amethi, according to sources, despite the party’s central leadership remaining silent about the contest.

One of the siblings may only run for office from one of the two seats, according to a different leader. Party members in Rai Bareli and Amethi are calling for Rahul and Priyanka to be fielded. On the other hand, others believe that if both are involved in the conflict, the party will be overstretching itself. We are aware that taking on the powerful BJP in UP is not an easy feat. The representative said that the merger with the Samajwadi Party (SP) is a positive development for the party. “The CEC will discuss all the aspects threadbare and take a call,” the leader added.

Rahul Gandhi’s possible comeback to his old seat of Amethi became more widely speculated about on Wednesday with the announcement by Uttar Pradesh Congress leader Pradeep Singhal that Gandhi will shortly declare his candidacy for Amethi.

Senior Congressmen had already made enough insinuations that the people of Amethi wanted Rahul to run for office from the seat. From 2002 until 2019, Gandhi, a former president of the Congress, served as Amethi’s parliamentary representative. He was defeated by Smriti Irani by a margin of more than 55,000 votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. At the moment, he represents Wayanad, Kerala, as an MP.

According to party sources, Rahul is expected to run not just from Amethi but also from Wayanad. It was expected that Priyanka would make her political debut from the party’s bastion of Rae Bareli, a seat her mother had won five times, ever since Sonia Gandhi went to the Rajya Sabha.

EC issues a warning Rahul

In the aftermath of his statements at the PM about “bad omen” and “pickpocketing,” Rahul Gandhi was urged by the Election Commission on Wednesday to use more caution in his public utterances. The Delhi High Court requested that the EC take action against him in December 2023, stating that the statements were not appropriate.