CHAIN EFFECT: Rahul Gandhi hugs his mother Sonia after filing his nomination papers (top); Rajiv Gandhi in Amethi, 1984 (above); AFP/ Rajesh kumar

The first exhilarating drops of a sudden April shower have just seeped into the thirsty soil of Amethi, and Mohammed Rafiq is reminded of Rajiv Gandhi. “You know,” says the wizened old hakim of a village adjoining Jagdishpur, “Rajiv constantly thought of Amethi. Someone told me that once when there was a hailstorm in Delhi, he looked out of the window and said: ‘I wonder what is happening in Amethi.’”

Rafiq’s pucca house in Mauja Lakhmipur is our first stop, and the first whiff of a collective memory that follows us through Amethi and Rae Bareli. We have run along several hundred kilometres of a region that, on the face of it, continues to defy all reason. In the rest of Uttar Pradesh — which still accounts for the largest chunk of Parliament — the cycle rides, the elephant plods on and the lotus blooms. But in the Gandhi pocket borough, 15 years after a member of the family last ruled at the Centre, the hand is still held high.

This is the fiefdom of the Gandhi-Nehru family, an oasis in a desert where the Congress is an anachronism. Sonia Gandhi is everybody’s bahu, Rahul, the eternal bhaiyya, and Priyanka, the beloved of all. Here, issues that rock the nation are openly sneered at. Dynasty, the fact that Sonia Gandhi is a political novice and Rahul, even more so, are no issues. Sonia’s foreign origins have never been a matter of debate. Standing under a lamppost as rains lash Rae Bareli, driver Ram Naresh Prajapati tells us why. “My daughter has just got married and has gone away to Pratapgarh. Will they call her an outsider there?”

Not surprisingly, when the Gandhis campaign in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the crowds spill on to streets. Young men wear white T-shirts with the Congress colours, small children don similar caps and the street corners are awash with banners and posters. Old men shout slogans and young women wave flags. And there is even one moment when — for whatever reason — a small calf comes sprinting up towards Rahul Gandhi’s cavalcade.

“Call it what you will, but there is some magic here,” says Ramesh Dixit, a professor of political science at Lucknow University. A nine-year-old boy’s wide-eyed look seems to capture the spell that the family has cast. “Humarey hathwa chuin liye (he touched my hands),” says the boy in an Awadhi dialect to his band of clearly envious friends.

This is the region where feudalism still rules, where poverty is naked and development an old dream. But this is also where hope still lingers. Rahul Gandhi is contesting from Amethi and the locals are convinced that it won’t be long before he leads the Congress and the country. And in Rae Bareli — being contested by Sonia — a Gandhi returns to the constituency after nearly 25 years. The family connection remained — through Rajiv Gandhi’s great-aunt, Sheila Kaul, and cousin, Arun Nehru — but it’s Indira Gandhi that old-timers of Rae Bareli continue to recall.

Indira Gandhi was the MP from Rae Bareli, a seat that was once represented by her husband, Feroze Gandhi, and one she lost in the anti-Emergency wave of 1977. She won it again in 1980, but forsook the eastern Uttar Pradesh seat for Medak in Andhra Pradesh. Local legend has it that the people of Rae Bareli have since then been waiting for the Gandhis to forgive them for the historic defeat.

Amethi was selected by the Gandhis for its proximity to Rae Bareli. Represented first by Sanjay Gandhi, the seat moved from one Gandhi to another after his death in 1980. “Now Rahul is here, reminding us ever so much of his father,” says Guruprasad Tripathi of Shukul Bazaar, a hamlet in Amethi.

This is a common refrain in the region — a constant recall of the Gandhi magic. Somebody has seen Indira, somebody else has worked with Rajiv. Villagers tell us how Nehru zeroed in on Rae Bareli, a backward region, and how Indira turned it into a developed town with roads, canals, public-sector units and schools and colleges. “The people of the region have a sense of gratitude towards the Gandhis,” says Dixit, who was earlier with the Congress and is now the national secretary of Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party. “The Gandhis, undoubtedly, have done a lot for the region.”

Indira, villagers stress, was the doer, Sanjay was “dynamite” and Rajiv, shy to begin with but an Amethi man in the end. And Sonia is the daughter-in-law who, they maintain, is carrying on Rajiv’s legacy.

“She knows the people of the region,” says Akhilesh Pratap Singh, chief spokesperson of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee. He tells us of a story that still moves the people of Amethi — of one Holi five years ago.

Sonia was still to become an MP from Amethi, which was then represented by family friend Satish Sharma. In Delhi, Sonia got to know that Haji Wasim, a Congress member of the legislative assembly from the area, was suffering from cancer. She called Sharma, who was in Amethi, and asked him to fly Wasim to Delhi for treatment. “But it’s Holi,” Sharma is said to have demurred. “Everything is at a standstill.”

Says Singh: “But Soniaji had said she wanted Wasim to be flown to Delhi, and we had to do something about it. I still remember that Holi day. Everybody was drunk and smearing us with colour and cow-dung. In the midst of all that, somehow we managed to take Haji Wasim to Delhi in a private plane.” Wasim died subsequently, but, clearly, the story lives on.

The region’s link with the Gandhis and Nehrus is an old one. Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal, supported the region’s powerful peasant movement and the feudal royals’ involvement in India’s Independence movement. The Nehrus were the lawyers for the royals of Amethi — the family now represented by Sanjay Singh, once estranged and now back with the Congress.

“It is said that Jawaharlal Nehru bought his first car — a second-hand one — with the money that he had earned as a junior lawyer in Motilal Nehru’s chamber on a case that he had fought on behalf of the Amethi royal family,” says Dixit.

Just as the Amethi royals still have a hold over the region, there is, for the people and the Gandhis, an underlying sense of belonging. Other politicians have had their pocket boroughs, but the Gandhis’ sway over Amethi and its adjoining areas underlines a unique bonding that takes precedence over anything else. In every other constituency in Uttar Pradesh, the votes are divided, shared by disparate segments — the Samajwadi party has its hold over the Yadavs and Muslims, the Bahujan Samaj Party controls the Dalit vote and the Bharatiya Janata Party lords over the upper castes and sections of the other backward castes.

“But in Amethi, everybody — from the Dalit or the Muslim to the Brahmin — votes for the Congress,” says Lucknow-based political commentator Hisam Siddiqui. “This is atypical of the rest of the state,” he says.

There are, clearly, reasons for that. For one, the Gandhis are the unofficial first family — American newspapers insist on referring to them as the Kennedys of India — and the dynasty is still considered powerful in the region. “When people vote for the Congress, they vote for Sonia,” asserts Dixit. “And that’s not just true of Amethi and Rae Bareli. When people vote for a Parliamentarian in Karnataka or Madhya Pradesh, do you think they do so because of S.M. Krishna or Digvijay Singh? No — they do so because of Sonia,” he says.

“One cannot deny that the family holds a position in the Indian polity,” he says. “That is why when foreign dignitaries visit India, they make it a point to call on Sonia Gandhi. It’s a brand name,” says Dixit.

What moves the people of Amethi and Rae Bareli is not just the name, but the rapport that the successive generations of the Gandhis have built with the people of the region. In Amethi, for instance, there is a hierarchical system in place. The interests of every 10 or 12 clusters of Amethi’s 1700-odd villages are looked after by a group of people who, in turn, have direct access to party leaders. “Scores of people take a night train and reach Delhi the next morning. Within a day or two, they manage to meet Sonia with their complaints,” says Singh.

Even Rahul Gandhi’s candidature was discussed by the villagers of Amethi before it was made public by the Congress High Command in New Delhi. Siddiqui says that he met up with an old Amethi resident some weeks ago and asked him where he had been. “Arrey bhai, I was in Delhi. Soniaji called some of us to over to her house to discuss Rahul’s candidature,” he replied. Says Siddiqui, “Do you think villagers who sit and have a meal with Sonia and give their views about Rahul Gandhi will ever have anything critical to say about the family?”

There is a direct interaction with the people of the region — described by an observer as a “touchy-feely” bond — that the emotional people of Awadh cherish. Indira Gandhi mingled freely with the rural people — a trait that her grand-daughter seems to have picked up. Congress workers seldom fail to point out Priyanka’s campaign on behalf of a poor Dalit family of Amethi, whose house was razed in an attack. “She asked the Dalit family: ‘What do you want me to do?’ They said, ‘Rapat likhwana hai (We want to file a complaint)’,” says Akhilesh Singh. The reluctant police was forced to file a complaint, and Singh says, under Priyanka’s eagle eyes, Congress workers and local villagers together rebuilt the house.

Sonia does her bit, too, to keep up with Indira Gandhi’s image. On Thursday, after campaigning with Priyanka in Unchahar, the Safari carrying the mother and daughter disappeared into a secluded corner of Rae Bareli, leaving the cavalcade behind. Later, we were told that she had stopped by to share a meal with some local people. Till recently, Gandhi used to have a quick lunch in her car on her way from one meeting to another. But she was advised by the locals that hospitality was important to the region, and a shared meal would underscore her links with the people.

“Indira Gandhi did that,” she was told. And Sonia stopped eating in the car.

Even Rahul Gandhi, with his bald, three-line campaign speeches, is learning. In a village in Jagdishpur, which his uncle and father tried to build up as an industrial area but which now lies in neglect, his car is mobbed by villagers who want him to taste some prasad from a neighbouring Hanuman temple. The prasad — a plate of syrupy rasgullahs by the look of it — is being brought to him but Gandhi doesn’t see it. He gets off his car and walks up to a temple a kilometre away, with a posse of nervous security men behind him.

On another day, at hakim Rafiq’s house, his young daughters surround Rahulbhaiyya, asking him for an autograph. There is nothing to sign on, and Rahul — with his peeping dimples — signs his name with a flourish on a little girl’s hand.

For the people of Amethi and Rae Bareli — poor and marginalised — Rahul and Priyanka represent a dream that is out of reach. The sense of feudalism in the way the villagers wait for a glimpse of the young and handsome duo is stark, sometimes even tragic. But Congress workers are convinced that the magic sells, and will work wonders in the rest of the country as well, if the two agree to campaign for the party.

After all, it’s the Gandhi factor that keeps the Congress together, not its ideology, policies or plank. And many in the Congress believe that for the urban middle class, critical of Sonia’s Italian origins, the charisma of the young Gandhis — despite their lack of experience or expression — will work.

But, surprisingly, it’s Rahul, armed with a modern upbringing and a Western education, who seems queasy about the mass adulation that his very presence evokes.

“The one thing that really troubles me is the inequality in India,” he says as we — a few reporters — ring around his battered Qualis and ask him about the raja-praja or the landlord-vassal relationship that the Gandhis have with Amethi. “It bothers me,” he says. “But give me two years, and I guarantee that you’ll see a change.”

That could have come straight from the heart, or it could be a clever electoral pitch. Either way, the boy is learning. Amethi seems to do that to them.