LUCKNOW: With the upcoming Lok Sabha elections just a couple of months away, BJP MP and Union Minister Smriti Irani is in AN overdrive to consolidate her ground by settling down in Amethi, the erstwhile Gandhi bastion that is represented by Irani now. Smriti Irani has planned the ‘grih pravesh’ (house warming) puja of her new house in Amethi on February 22.
As per the sources close to Smriti Irani, she has sent invites to around 25,000 guests, including local MLAs and MLCs, cutting across party lines.
The Union Minister has got a sprawling single-story house, constructed over an area of around 15,000 square feet in Medan Mawai village, barely 2 km from the local BJP office on Sultanpur Road.
Irani had snatched Amethi from Congress kitty by defeating former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in 2019 general elections. Recently, former AICC chief Sonia Gandhi had bid adieu to her traditional Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat.
Irani is expected to reach Amethi on Monday, February 19 to participate in BJP’s village outreach campaign -- Gram Chaupal.
Incidentally, the same day, her bête noire and Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi would also lead his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra to Gauriganj area of Amethi via Bhadohi, Prayagraj, and Pratapgarh.
“Irani has fulfilled the promise made to people of Amethi in 2014. She had promised then that she would make a house in Amethi and settle here as a local resident,” recalls BJP’s Amethi spokesperson, Govind Chauhan.
However, in 2014, she had lost Amethi to Rahul Gandhi but kept grooming the constituency which she eventually won by a margin of over 50,000 votes in 2019.
Earlier, Irani used to operate from a rented house which currently functions as a camp office, from where Irani coordinates at the local level.
However, discarding Irani’s gesture to get a house constructed for herself in Amethi as a “gimmick," a Congress spokesman Anshu Awasthi said that she had failed to deliver on the promises she made to the people of Amethi.
“Whatever development took place in Amethi was only because of the Congress and Rahul Gandhi,” asserted Awasthi.
Political pundits view Smirti Irani’s grih-pravesh puja as an attempt to firm up her ground in Amethi amid growing suspense over Congress' plans to field a candidate from the Gandhi family—probably Rahul Gandhi himself—from its erstwhile pocket borough in upcoming LS polls.
BJP sources said that Smriti has also been organizing exhaustive camps to reach out to the people in various assembly seats in Amethi district, including Salon, which otherwise happens to come under the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat.
Speculation has been gaining ground that Congress may field Priyanka Gandhi from Rae Bareli after Sonia filed her nomination for Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan.
In 2019, Irani defeated Rahul in the four of the five assembly segments within the Lok Sabha constituency -- Salon, Jagdishpur, Tiloi, and Gauriganj -- but lost Amethi by a slender margin of 230 votes. Notably, the Samajwadi Party had abstained from fielding a candidate in both Amethi and Rae Bareli.