Varun Gandhi: The burden of being a Gandhi

The flamboyant Varun Gandhi filed his nomination papers today to fight the Lok Sabha election from the Sultanpur constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Amethi, Rae Bareli and Sultanpur will receive all the attention in the days to come because the three Gandhis are fighting the Lok Sabha election from these three places. While Amethi and Rae Bareli are Rahul and Sonia Gandhi's pocket-boroughs. Sultanpur will see Varun Gandhi from the BJP who is Rahul Gandhi's estranged cousin sweating it out to emerge as a winner in the 16th Lok Sabha election.

The Gandhi surname used to be a magnet that pulled voters towards it effortlessly. Now it is not so. Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are fighting it out in this Lok Sabha election that is getting more challenging for the Congress with each passing day. This is why the Congress is leaving no stone unturned and has deployed Priyanka Gandhi too into the battlefield.

As far as Varun Gandhi is concerned, the BJP can claim that even it has Gandhi in its fold. But Varun Gandhi invariably finds himself under attacks from unexpected quarters. Priyanka Gandhi grabbed the headlines when she urged the voters to teach Varun Gandhi a lesson because he has gone astray. Sultanpur and Amethi have a distance of 248 kilometres between them and the campaigns between both the cousins are likely to get interesting with stray personal attacks in between. Priyanka Gandhi will relentlessly campaign in Amethi to help her brother win against the BJP's Smriti Irani and the AAP's Kumar Vishwas.

Even Kumar Vishwas has not spared Varun Gandhi in this tough battle in which the pride is equally at stake. Kumar Vishwas dismisses Varun Gandhi by saying that if he had no Gandhi in his surname, he would not even get a Medical Representative's job. This below the belt remark only invokes pity for Kumar Vishwas whose too clever by half jibe leaves no one in doubt that his knowledge regarding poor medical representatives is appalling to say the least. He does not know how much talent is required to get a job as an MR and what intense pressure an MR has to undergo with a view to sustaining his job.  

But poor Varun Gandhi has to suffer all this because his surname is Gandhi and the burden of this surname sometimes becomes a bit too much to carry. All said and done, like his late father Sanjay Gandhi, Varun Gandhi is a go-getter in politics and not new to the controversies though he has considerably mellowed down on his rhetoric and steered himself clear from controversies. 

Even in Sultanpur Varun Gandhi will obviously benefit from the Modi wave and the Congress candidate Amita Singh opposite him will feel the heat. Having said that, Varun Gandhi will have to work over time to win Sultanpur because with his cousins lurking around in Amethi, the controversies will be waiting to knock at Varun Gandhi's doors. He will have to carefully weigh his each word before speaking because obviously he will not like anything to ruin his chances of winning when his party is hot favourite to win this election and form the government at the centre next month.