RAE BARELI: Donning a garland of port-coloured carnations, a young woman climbs on to a platform and begins a speech to several hundred villagers in the swirling dust of north India.
Her peroration begins with a family history and ends with the words "Jai Hind" (Victory to India).
Immediately she finishes, Priyanka Gandhi, whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather all became Indian prime ministers, disappears into a surging crowd of children and women. Set against the backdrop of mud and thatch houses, it is a scene repeated a dozen times that day.
Ms Gandhi has taken to the hustings in India's general elections to campaign for her mother, Sonia, who leads India's Congress party, and her elder brother, Rahul, who is standing as a parliamentary candidate for the first time. Both mother and son are contesting seats in Uttar Pradesh, the country's largest state, which sent two generations of Gandhis to parliament.
"It is an emotional relationship we have with the people here. They remember what my family has done for them," Ms Gandhi told the London-based Guardian newspaper.
Politics is often a family affair in India and scions of more than 100 dynasties are taking part in the national election that begins on Tuesday and continues for the next four weeks.
But with a name that has been synonymous with Indian politics for half a century, Ms Gandhi has emerged as the star of the ballot which will determine who will lead the world's largest democracy.
While opinion polls predict that the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies will return to power, the psychology graduate and mother of two has revived interest in the Congress party which has previously lacked a charismatic campaigner who could transcend religion, caste, region and language - the fault lines of Indian society.
"The Congress party should have brought her out earlier. Priyanka has the look of Indira Gandhi and could be a Princess Diana figure for Indian politics," said VP Singh, a former prime minister of India.
The 31-year-old listens to the complaints of villagers: they have to walk two miles to fetch water, there is no electricity and political opponents of the Gandhis are intimidating people into not voting.
"People here do not even have the basic amenities. ... The budget for development in one year built just 15km of road. Too often the money just gets hijacked by people with criminal backgrounds," said Ms Gandhi, who is known by her maiden name.
Nowhere are these problems more apparent than in Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 170 million - an electorate bigger than Russia's - and sends 80 parliamentarians to India's 543-strong legislature.
With eight per cent of the world's poor, the state is known for having India's lowest literacy rate and, according to the World Bank, some of the worst corruption. While India's recent economic success has become an election issue the national debate has become polarised around two issues of national identity.
One is a commitment from the BJP to bar foreign- born persons from "important offices of the Indian state". The other is a promise to build a "magnificent" temple on the site of a mosque razed by Hindu mobs in the early 1990s.
The law on foreign-born citizens, analysts say, is aimed at one person: Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, who was born in Italy. "Do I look like a foreigner's daughter" is Ms Gandhi's response. "The BJP's ideology is a divisive one. ... How can it improve lives with that kind of agenda?"-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
