“My husband is not like this, he has two daughters. It is a fake case, let people give us justice” — at every public meeting in Amethi, Maharaji Prajapati and her daughters Sudha and Ankita break down in tears, making the villagers well up too. A short address by Maharaji and Ankita is followed by them going into the crowd, embracing women who console them, wiping tears themselves.

This is the scene in Amethi, where the Samajwadi Party has given a ticket to a homemaker, Maharaji Prajapati, the wife of former SP minister Gayatri Prajapati who was convicted with a life sentence in a rape case last year and is in jail. Gayatri was the Amethi MLA from 2007 to 2012 before he became the ‘villain’ of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections over a rape case and lost this seat.

The SP is clearly trying to whip up sympathy for the Prajapati family this time to wrest back the constituency from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has put up the ‘King of Amethi’ Sanjay Sinh, who has quite a story of his own. Sinh, a former MP, was the face of the Congress in Amethi before he shifted to BJP two years ago with his wife Ameeta Singh who lost in the 2017 elections from this seat from the Congress.

The winner then was Sinh’s ‘legally-wedded wife’ Garima Singh from the BJP. With the entire Sinh family now in the BJP, the party has chosen to give a ticket to Sanjay rather than to any of the two queens. Sinh is contesting an assembly election after nearly 30 years. “I was not that keen when offered the ticket to fight, but I am a committed soldier of the BJP now,” Sinh told CNN-News18.

Sympathy for whom?

“Our society is always sympathetic for this kind of situation but at the same time, Amethi’s people know that justice has come from the courts. The sympathy is actually for that girl who was raped and the legal system has taken a decision. Amethi’s people are not that innocent that they will not understand what is correct and what is wrong,” Sinh said in an interview with CNN-NEWS18.

At the SP’s public meetings, the mother and her daughters are terming it a fake case and saying they are appealing before the High Court as even the victim did not back her story in court. “I am going to the public for justice for my husband. The government implicated my husband in this case. My husband is not like this; he has not cast a bad eye on anyone. He is innocent and I can never believe my husband can do something like this,” Maharaji Prajapati told CNN-NEWS18.

Her daughter Ankita says, “Wrong has been done with my father; it was an injustice.” She says her father has been in jail for five years and they are telling people how they have been tortured in the process. “He was booked in a fake case and still he was sentenced. We are telling people of our struggle over the last five years. We will file an appeal in the High Court,” Ankita told CNN-NEWS18.

The family also says that when union minister Ajay Mishra’s son Ashish Mishra could get bail after allegedly running over farmers, why can’t Gayatri Prajapati get bail when his health condition is poor in jail. “He is a saviour of the poor and helpless,” says Maharaji Prajapati. The daughter adds: “We will work even more than our father for this area. Just strengthen our and Akhilesh’s hands to bring him out of jail.”

Sanjay’s advice for Congress

The seat with a lot of Yadav and Muslim voters gives an edge to the SP and, further, the Congress candidate is a Brahmin, which could hurt some BJP votes here, locals say. Sanjay Sinh, however, maintains that the Congress is nowhere in the picture in Amethi anymore.

“The Congress itself is not ready to see their own house. Amethi was the so-called fiefdom of the Congress only because of us. My father called Sanjay Gandhi to contest from here. The Congress is not serious about the Congress. The BJP and Modi are going to the lowest level of people and trying to uplift them and people are accepting them. That is why the BJP going up and Congress going down,” Sanjay Sinh told CNN-NEWS18 in Amethi.

The basic flaw in the Congress, Sanjay Sinh says, is that “Congress leaders are seeing their own likes and dislikes now and not what is good and correct for the party. That is the problem.”

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