RAE BARELI: Indira Gandhi built what became India’s most politically connected road that links Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, to Rae Bareli, a sleepy, dusty town from where she projected her power as the nation’s most polarising politician, albeit in two separate terms.

As I travelled on the road on Wednesday to watch Sonia Gandhi’s strategists battle a determined opposition in this Nehru-Gandhi heirloom of a constituency, much of the 80km stretch looked in an unusual state of disrepair. You may be tempted to read it as the signs of time to come.

In the neighbouring rural yet politically versatile hub of Amethi, her son Rahul Gandhi will face two main foes on May 7, one from the rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party and the other from the anti-corruption Aaam Aadmi Party (AAP), both seriously challenging his much discussed jaded charisma.

Bordering Amethi is Sultanpur from where Varun Gandhi is contesting as the BJP’s erratically youthful hero. Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi played with him as children, as closely knit cousins.

The terrain is important to bear in mind. Amethi, Sultanpur, Rae Bareli and Pratapgarh, another politically vibrant parliamentary seat, form a cluster of towns where pre-independence kisaan movement was legendary for its focus and organisation.

The peasantry of Uttar Pradesh, then United Provinces, was in ferment against the exploitative combination of Indian zamindars and their colonial allies.

Mahatma Gandhi, never the one to confront India’s ruling elite, sent his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru to quell the kisaan movement and to bring the angry peasants into the Congress’ fold.

I crossed the shrunken Sai river on my way to Unchahar, on the western flank of the Rae Bareli parliamentary constituency. Nehru stood on one bank of the river as he watched well-armed zamindars shooting at the protesting peasants on the other bank. Much against his grain, he decided there was little he could do to undermine Gandhi’s advice, which was to defang the farmers and to make them fall in line with his policy of non-violence.

It is this hodge-podge policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hound that Nehru’s heirs have continued to follow. They need the zamindar’s political clout and they can’t do without the peasants’ votes. Even entrenched Marxists have been thrown by the policy’s facile success.

Narendra Modi has threatened to change the equation in his own way. But he was not the first to mock it.

In fact it was the Congress that cast the first stone at the alleged populism of Indira Gandhi’s policies. Dr Manmohan Singh in his avatar as the finance minister was the man who exposed India’s peasants to the vagaries of the free markets and then to global bourses. He admired Narendra Modi as a development guru although on a smaller scale in Gujarat, a euphemism for neo-liberal top down theorists.

Sonia Gandhi sought to do course correction by setting up an advisory council that would guide some of the market-oriented policies towards poverty alleviation. Heavyweight business captains resented what they saw as a waste of the state’s precious resources.

They switched allegiance to Modi. The current elections are, however, not discussing this, not the least because the Congress is not prepared to make a clean break from its comfort zone of befriending all sides, including its core financiers.

If Rae Bareli symbolises Sonia Gandhi’s political heritage replete with well-funded NGOs, women’s schemes and plans for local self-employment, Narendra Modi needed to manufacture a foil. He found it in his fanatical passion for violent nationalism. Its communally divisive zeal has made him invincible in Gujarat. Can he foil Rae Bareli?

With an eye on Uttar Pradesh’s 80 make or break seats in the multi-stage elections, Modi has been wooing its electorate with a direct appeal to his self-proclaimed magic cure for all ailments. The main ingredient in his magic potion is religion and Varanasi, with its legendary Hindu ethos, fits the bill.

The distance between Rae Bareli and Varanasi to the east adds up to just over 300 kms. That’s the number of seats that Modi says he wants to deliver on his promise of making India prosperous, and secure.

The fly in the ointment is a far less advertised battle being waged by the Aam Aadmi Party whose leader Arvind Kejriwal has pitched his tent in Varanasi, sanguine in his faith of defeating the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in his lair.

It is only fair that the battle in Varanasi will be the final epic of a month-long competition. When the curtains come down on the elections on May 12, it won’t be just enough for Sonia Gandhi to have won from Rae Bareli, or for Modi to have edged past his rivals in Varanasi or Vadodra, or both.

The two constituencies in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh will define the triumph and defeat of much more.