With the Congress party yet to announce its candidate for the high-stakes contest on the Amethi Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday kept up the suspense and said, “will act on whatever order the party gives me”.

While responding to a question on whether he will contest the Lok Sabha election from Amethi seat, scheduled for May 20, Rahul Gandhi said, “This is BJP’s question, very good. These decisions are being taken in the party’s CEC meetings. As far as Amethi is concerned, it is the decision of the party; whatever order the party will give me, I will act on it.”

He added that he is a soldier of the party and will abide by the decision the committee takes.

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Amethi, once a stronghold for the Gandhis, was won by the BJP’s Smriti Irani in the 2019 elections with Rahul Gandhi facing defeat. Irani has been renominated from the seat, however, Congress is yet to nominate its candidate. Speculation has been rife that Rahul Gandhi, who has already filed his nomination from Kerala’s Wayanad, will contest from Amethi too.

The 53-year-old is expected to make an effort to win back the seat, represented earlier by his uncle Sanjay Gandhi, his father Rajiv Gandhi, and later, his mother Sonia Gandhi.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Smriti Irani unseated Rahul Gandhi, ending his 15-year reign in Amethi, by a margin of 55,000 votes, earning her the tag of ‘giant slayer’.

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The Lok Sabha polls are scheduled to be held in seven phases starting April 19. The counting of votes will be taken up on June 4.

‘PM Modi champion of corruption’

In the press conference, the Congress leader said there was a strong undercurrent in favour of the INDIA bloc and the BJP would be limited to just 150 seats.

“Around 15–20 days ago, I was thinking the BJP would win around 180 seats, but now I think they will get 150 seats. We are getting reports from every state that we are improving. We have a very strong alliance in Uttar Pradesh, and we will perform very well,” he said.

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Training his guns on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the now scrapped electoral bonds scheme, Rahul called it the “biggest extortion scheme in the world”. He also labelled PM Modi as the “champion of corruption”.

“The Prime Minister says that the system of electoral bonds was brought for transparency, to clean politics. If this is true, then why was that system cancelled by the Supreme Court. And secondly, if you wanted to bring transparency, then why did you hide the names of those who gave money to BJP. And why did you hide the dates on which they gave you the money?” he said.

In February, a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme that allowed anonymous donations to political parties, calling it “unconstitutional”. The Congress has made it a key poll plank to take on the Modi government.

(With inputs from PTI)