New Delhi: Ajay Rai – a politician who started his career with the student wing of Hindu nationalist outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) before going on to contest two Lok Sabha elections against Narendra Modi in Varanasi – was nominated by the Congress as its state president in politically-significant Uttar Pradesh on Thursday, August 17.
Rai is a former five-time MLA from Varanasi. He replaced Brij Lal Khabri, who had been appointed as the Congress state head less than a year ago in what was then seen as a move by the party to reignite interest among the numerically-important Dalit voters accounting for 21.5% of the state population. While Khabri is a Dalit, Rai, 54, belongs to the dominant upper caste Bhumihar community, which though inconsequential in the overall caste arithmetic of UP, has political weight in districts around Varanasi and a strong sense of ‘jati asmita’ or caste pride.
However, a Congress source said that Rai seems to have been nominated to the post due to his personal record and influence, rather than just caste calculations. “We already have a Dalit (Mallikarjun Kharge) as the national president. In UP we want someone who can fight on the streets. We have picked someone who fought directly against Modi. We want to indicate that our fight is directly against the BJP,” said the Congress source.
Like Khabri, Rai was also an import into the Congress. Khabri was a former Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MP from Jalaun. Rai had a long past with the BJP before he joined the Congress. He was last year appointed a provincial president of the party in East UP.
A graduate of the Kashi Vidyapeeth in Varanasi, Rai began his career as a convenor of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS-BJP, in 1991-92. Rai participated in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and was even held in the Varanasi district jail under preventive sections of the law.
He entered electoral politics with a bang in 1996 when he defeated nine-time sitting Communist Party of India (Marxist) MLA Udal from the Kolasla seat. In 2002, he won from the Kolasla assembly constituency again. A few months later he was rewarded with a ministerial berth as state minister for cooperatives in the Mayawati-led BSP-BJP alliance government. After a third assembly win in 2007, feeling betrayed that the party had picked veteran leader Murli Manohar Joshi as its Lok Sabha candidate from Varanasi despite promising it to him, he quit the BJP in 2009. “I was promised the ticket and I worked hard for a year. But for reasons unknown I was shunted at the last moment,” he told me in 2014.
Rai contested the 2009 Lok Sabha election as a candidate of the Samajwadi Party. He stood third with 1.23 lakh votes but the contest would be remembered more for the way tainted politician and rival Bahubali of Purvanchal Mukhtar Ansari gave Joshi a run for his money. Ansari lost to Joshi by a relatively thin margin of 17,000 votes in what turned out to be a communally polarised contest.
Even though Rai denies it, in the narrow lanes and by-lanes of Varanasi, it is often said that after sensing that he would not win, Rai campaigned for Joshi to ensure Mukhtar Ansari’s defeat because of their bitter relationship. In June 2023, a Varanasi court convicted Ansari and sentenced him to life for murdering Rai’s brother Awadesh Rai in 1991.
Rai’s journey with the Congress started in 2012 when he contested as its candidate and routed the BJP nominee to secure Pindra (earlier known as Kolasla). The BJP candidate was reduced to 3,000 votes as Rai got his sweet revenge.
It was in this setting that the Congress in 2014, looking to prevent the BJP’s prime ministerial face Narendra Modi from securing Varanasi, one of the holiest Hindu cities, picked Rai as his challenger. Arvind Kejriwal was the other candidate in the highly-watched contest. Rai’s nomination elevated his stature. However, since the contest was reduced to a fight between Modi and Kejriwal, he had to contend with a third-place finish. The same thing happened in 2019 when the SP-BSP alliance candidate o edged past him as runner-up against Modi, who won by a huge margin.
While the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha election results in Varanasi may not be a referendum on Rai’s local popularity, his electoral fortunes have definitely declined ever since his association with the grand old party. In both 2017 and 2022, Rai stood third from Pindra, a seat he had once claimed as his own. A big question mark also hangs on how Rai will rejuvenate the debilitated Congress unit in Uttar Pradesh as we inch closer to the 2024 Lok Sabha election.