The ruling Congress party's ruling family's love for their pocket boroughs of Amethi and Raebareli is well known. Not, of course, that it is an entirely altruistic connection. Feroze Gandhi, Congress President Sonia Gandhi's father-in-law, represented Raebareli in independent India's first Parliament, and they have been largely safe seats for various Nehru-Gandhis ever since. This has been repaid with amounts of patronage that would embarrass everyone except the hopelessly sycophantic Congress party. Most recently, the Union Cabinet last week announced that Sonia Gandhi'a seat of Raebareli would be granted two universities - one an "aviation" university, and the other a "women's" university. The cost of the two projects: over Rs 700 crore.
Nor were these the only benefits. Ms Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi, are probably more worried than they have been in recent decades about their hold on the two districts. In the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections in March 2012, the 10 Assembly segments of their two Lok Sabha constituencies turned against the Congress for the first time in recent history. The party won only two out of those 10. It lost every seat in Raebareli in particular; and in three of the five Vidhan Sabha seats, the Congress didn't even make it to second place. And thus the shower of goodies over the past year or so. The Raebareli-to-Lucknow road is being four-laned, at a cost of Rs 600 crore, for example. An FM station has been announced, and a park specialising in spice production. This year's Railway Budget announced a giant new coaching complex and railway wheel production unit at Raebareli Station, costing Rs 1000 crore.
Few people will have fainted away in surprise at the names of the new institutions. The women's university will be named after Indira Gandhi; the aviation university after Rajiv Gandhi. They will swell the ranks of the districts' many imaginatively-named institutions: the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Information Technology, the Indira Gandhi Eye Hospital and Research Centre, the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana, the Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Udaan Akademi, the Indira Gandhi Girls Inter College, the Kamala Nehru Postgraduate College, the Feroze Gandhi Institute of Technology, the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology, and of course the Indira Gandhi Memorial Botanical Garden. Rahul Gandhi has promised to add a Central institute of hotel management, though it is not as yet known for certain which family will be given the honour of providing a name to it.
Clearly, if in spite of all these attempts at skilling, Amethi and Raebareli aren't happy, that means that there aren't jobs, either. Not that the Centre has not been more than usually solicitous in that regard, either. A steel plant was set up in Amethi in the 1990s by the Usha group, which went sick shortly thereafter. In 2009, however - in what must be pure coincidence, shortly before the general elections - it was taken over and re-opened as a unit of the public-sector SAIL. And there are not one but two units of the public-sector BHEL. But it seems that's not enough either. It turns out that most of these aren't performing at peak capacity, thanks to a shortage of power. Power to Amethi and Raebareli is a constant casualty of the state of political relations between New Delhi and Lucknow; recently, the power was reportedly shut off when the Samajwadi Party decided to draw further away from the Congress. The lessons for the Gandhis are considerable. The state can't raise a place to prosperity on its own. A divided polity can hold it back, too. Until the Gandhis can not only lure the private sector to their boroughs and let them prosper, the people of those districts will continue to struggle. And what is true for Amethi and Raebareli is true for every other district of India, too.
