Congress gets big boost in Varanasi against Modi

The Congress Party came up with a master stroke on Tuesday as an influential mafia don-turned-politician pledged support to the Congress candidate in Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) from where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi is contesting.
Mukhtar Ansari’s support to Congress candidate Ajay Rai is a rude jolt to Modi. Neither the BJP nor Modi can afford to take the Ansari factor in Varanasi lightly. This is because Ansari had contested the last Lok Sabha election in 2009 from Varanasi as a candidate of the Bahujan Samaj Party against the BJP heavyweight Murli Manohar Joshi and nearly defeated him.
Joshi, a former BJP president, had scraped through with a narrow victory margin of 18,000 votes. Ansari, leader of the Quami Ekta Dal and the grandson of former Congress president and pre-partition leader Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, had emerged runners-up in the last election and polled more than 180,000 votes.
Interestingly, Ansari’s brother Afzal Ansari, who is currently in-charge of the Quami Ekta Dal, had recently announced that QED would support Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal who too is contesting election from Varanasi.
Mukhtar Ansari is currently in jail for several alleged crimes, including murder, to which he has pleaded not guilty. The development would inevitably make the Varanasi election an edge-of-the-seat thriller. It would make Modi more vulnerable from this constituency which has been a BJP stronghold for years.
The BJP would not be satisfied just with a mere win for Modi from Varanasi. It would be hoping for Modi’s win with a record margin. Such hopes have been torpedoed with Tuesday’s development.
A record number of 78 candidates are in the fray in Varanasi, dramatically up from just 15 candidates in the 2009 general election. Varanasi goes to polls on May 12, the ninth and last phase of polling.
Meanwhile, the political fate of presidents of India’s two biggest parties – Congress and BJP – would be sealed in electronic voting machines tomorrow as 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in UP go to polls on Wednesday. A total of 24 million voters, 13 million men and 10.9 million women, will decide the fate of 233 candidates.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi and BJP President Rajnath Singh are in the fray from Rae Bareli and Lucknow respectively and are in strong position.
Rae Bareli is a pocket borough of the Gandhi family and a traditionally strong bastion of the Congress. Singh too is in an advantageous position as the BJP has never lost from Lucknow since the Ram Temple movement nearly a quarter century ago.