Lucknow: Amethi district lost its VIP status a few days ago, while Allahabad High Court (HC) ruled that there is no Amethi district any more. Amethi is also the parliamentary constituency of Congress number 2 Rahul Gandhi.

The court’s verdict will directly impact Rahul’s efforts to implement centrally-funded schemes in his area; the Congress vice-president was on several Amethi district committees which will now cease to exist too. Rahul’s party leads the ruling UPA alliance at the Centre and the Congress’s second-most important national leader has made it clear that his political efforts for next year’s general elections will be centered around a big victory in UP.

In 2010, the then Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh (UP) had sliced parts of Rae Bareli and Sultanpur districts to carve out the state’s seventy-second district. She called it the Chhatrapati Sahuji Maharaj district. The Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, who displaced Mayawati’s BSP government last year, not only renamed the new district Amethi, but also granted it VIP status, which meant that it would get twenty-four-hour power supply in a state with an acute shortage of electricity. Those were days when his party’s relations with Rahul’s Congress were extremely cordial.

In recent months, however, that relationship has veered to hostile with Yadav’s father Mulayam Singh hitting out at the Congress repeatedly, though he continues to provide crucial external support  to the minority UPA government.

A few days ago, Akhilesh Yadav withdrew VIP status not from Amethi and from Rae Bareli, the parliamentary constituency of Sonia Gandhi, Congress chief and Rahul Gandhi’s mother.

In scrapping Amethi district on Monday April 15, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad HC accepted a public interest petition that the new district was illegal because a census survey was on when it was created. The law prohibits the creation of new districts when a census survey is under way.