Rahul follows mom Sonia, grandma Indira in choosing southern 'safe seat'

The Congress announced on Sunday that party chief Rahul Gandhi would be contesting the Lok Sabha elections from a second seat—Wayanad constituency in north Kerala. Rahul is the latest member of his family to embrace the idea of contesting Lok Sabha elections from safe seats in south India at times of national distress for the party.

Rahul is facing an aggressive challenge in Amethi from Union Minister Smriti Irani, who has remained engaged with the constituency since she narrowly lost to the Congress chief in 2014.

While the political scene in the five states of south India can hardly be described as homogeneous, the region has generally been perceived as being “more favourable” to the Congress even as the party ceded space in north and central India in the decades since independence. While Tamil Nadu started voting for the Dravidian parties in the 1960s itself, the Congress in Andhra Pradesh faced an electoral drubbing in 2014 over its decision to divide the state. However, the party remains formidable in Kerala and Karnataka.

It was Karnataka that attracted the first member of the Nehru-Gandhi family who sought a 'safe seat'.

Indira Gandhi looked south to re-enter Parliament after the anti-Congress wave in the 1977 general election, in the wake of the Emergency. After she lost her seat of Rae Bareli in the 1977 election, Indira decided to contest a by-election from Chikmagalur in Karnataka in 1978. The then sitting MP for Chikmagalur, D.B. Chandre Gowda of the Congress, resigned his seat to allow Indira to contest. Indira won the election, trouncing Veerendra Patil of the Janata Party by nearly 80,000 votes.

Twenty-one years later, Indira's elder daughter-in-law, Sonia, looked to the south for a safe seat as she entered the electoral fray for the first time. While she contested from Amethi, a traditional pocket-borough of the Nehru-Gandhis, Sonia also needed a safe seat as Uttar Pradesh was then governed by the BJP. Sonia settled on Bellary in Karnataka. The BJP poured in considerable efforts to challenge Sonia, putting up Sushma Swaraj as its candidate in Bellary. Swaraj fought an aggressive campaign and lost to Sonia by a relatively narrow margin of 56,000 votes. Sonia eventually resigned from the Bellary seat in 2000.

While both Chikmagalur and Bellary were chosen in a time of necessity, Indira once chose a safe seat in south India even when the Congress was on a surer footing.

In the 1980 elections, Indira contested from Rae Bareli and Medak in Andhra Pradesh, winning both seats by handsome margins. In Medak, her victory over S. Jaipal Reddy, who was with the Janata Party at the time, by a margin of over 2.10 lakh votes was a record then. Interestingly, Indira resigned from Rae Bareli and chose to represent Medak till she was assassinated in 1984.

With the exception of Medak in 1980, the decision by all three—Indira, Sonia and Rahul—to contest from safe seats in south India came amid near identical settings: the Congress had faced severe electoral setbacks in preceding national polls. While Indira was looking to rejuvenate the Congress after it lost power at the Centre for the first time in 1977, Rahul saw the Congress record its worst-ever parliamentary election performance in 2014.