Lucknow, April 15: As if the return to dark nights wasn’t enough, Rahul Gandhi’s Amethi has now lost its identity too.

A division bench of Allahabad High Court today ruled that the newly formed district, the parliamentary constituency of the Congress vice-president, would no longer remain a district.

The ruling, which cited a technical point, means the tehsil Amethi, which had been taken out from Sultanpur district along with four other administrative divisions to form the Amethi district, would revert to Sultanpur.

The number of districts in Uttar Pradesh also goes down by one to 74, though Rahul’s parliamentary constituency remains unaffected. The five administrative blocks — which made up the constituency since the days of his grandmother Indira Gandhi — will merely revert to their original districts: Tiloi and Salon to Rae Bareli; and Gauriganj, Musafirkhana and Amethi to Sultanpur.

For Amethi residents, though, the ruling was another blow to their charmed status. Last week, after eight months of uninterrupted supply, the Uttar Pradesh government ordered power cuts in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the parliamentary seat of Sonia Gandhi, reflecting the changed equations between the Congress and the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party.

Amethi’s second loss of “status” in a week — as some residents put it — was the fallout of a petition that had challenged an ordinance promulgated by the previous Mayawati government in July 2010.

The ordinance had announced the formation of the new district, which was then named after Chattrapati Sahuji Maharaj, a Dalit icon. The ostensible reason was smaller districts were easier to govern.

The petitioners said the ordinance had violated rules restricting formation of any new district between January 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011, as a population count was under way.

The bench of Chief Justice Shiva Kirti Singh and Justice D.K. Arora accepted their contention.

The petitioners had also alleged that not only was the formation of the district illegal, it was also inconvenient. “Gauriganj, made the district headquarters, was 50km from the Jagdishpur industrial hub, but the old district headquarters, Sultanpur, was just 10km from there,” the petitioners said.

But by the time the court’s order came, the new district had got a new name — Amethi, courtesy chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, who succeeded Mayawati.

On July 23 last year, Akhilesh had the district renamed Amethi. Sources said the change in name — at a time Samajwadi-Congress relations were cordial — followed requests from local Congress workers.

The relations have strained after a recent verbal duel between Samajwadi leaders and a Congress Union minister who was once an associate of Samajwadi boss Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Today, some Congress workers rued Amethi’s downgrade from a district to just a “block-level” town. “Amethi is learning to live with frequent changes in status. The area will miss out on development projects allotted separately for a district,” Rahul supporter Jagdish Piyus said from Amethi.

“We now pray to the state government to re-issue a notification declaring it a district.”

There has been no such indication from the Akhilesh government yet.