Rahul battles for seat as election end nears

AFP, Amethi :
Beleaguered Rahul Gandhi, battling to save India’s ruling Congress party in national elections, sought to win over sceptical voters in his constituency on Wednesday as voting in the world’s biggest democracy entered its final stages.
Gandhi, the scion of India’s most famous political dynasty whose lacklustre leadership of the Congress election campaign has drawn criticism, travelled to his northern parliamentary seat to witness voting first-hand.
He toured polling booths in Amethi-his family’s bastion for more than 30 years, which sent both his mother and late father to parliament-and told reporters that local people were “expressing their love for me”.
More than 95 million voters are eligible to vote in the penultimate leg of the election, which ends with results on May 16. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to oust Congress from power after 10 years.
“Change is in the air for all to see. I too voted for change,” voter Shyam Charan Gupta told AFP from Amethi, a poor rural area in the crucial battleground state of Uttar Pradesh.
The challenge facing Gandhi was underscored this week when opposition frontrunner Narendra Modi held a rally in Amethi and declared that nothing could save the dynasty. Modi, a Hindu nationalist hardliner who has campaigned on reviving the flagging economy, urged voters to “break ties with the family” that has produced three prime ministers.
Gandhi’s presence in Amethi on Wednesday was interpreted in the local media as a sign of concern due to competition from the BJP candidate, former actress Smriti Irani, and a popular anti-corruption campaigner, Kumar Vishwas.
In March, Gandhi’s campaign manager in Amethi told AFP that the former management consultant-who spends on average only one night a month in his constituency-had no plans for special campaigning there.
Most voters told AFP they still expected Gandhi to win, but said they would vote for him out of a sense of loyalty to the family rather than conviction in his abilities.
The constituency, mostly wheat-growing farmland dotted with hamlets, abounds with complaints about the poor roads and intermittent electricity, but Gandhi blames these problems on the local state government.
A poor result here-after victories with 66 percent and 72 percent in 2004 and 2009 — would deal a blow he would find it difficult to recover from. “The fight is now for the relevance of the Gandhi family as unquestioned leaders of the Congress,” Modi told the Times of India in an interview published Tuesday.