New Delhi, March 21: India's main opposition Congress Party, struggling to make a challenge out of the arriving general elections, nominated Mr Rahul Gandhi to his parents' parliamentary seat of Amethi on Sunday , giving its nervous supporters a cause to revel.

Mr Gandhi, 33, will be the fourth member of the Nehru-Gandhi family to begin his political career from Amethi, a constituency that has its economic future linked to political ties with Pakistan.

Mr Gandhi's mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi has decided to vacate the Amethi seat from where she won the last elections in 1999 by a record margin of more than 300,000 votes. She has shifted to neighbouring Rae Bareli, from where her father in law Feroz Gandhi and mother in law Indira Gandhi used to contest.

Interestingly, the announcement came on March 21, or Nauroz, celebrated by Indian Parsis as New Year's Day. Mr Feroz Gandhi came from the Parsi community, always celebrated by Ms Sonia Gandhi and her two children.

The move is being seen as a major effort by the Congress to shift the focus away from Sonia Gandhi's Italian origins. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata party has targeted her 'foreign origin' and says it would make a law to bar foreign-born Indians from getting the country's top political posts.

Amethi residents, speaking to Dawn on the telephone, described the celebrations that broke out there as akin to a big wedding. "Firecrackers, slogans, songs it was all happening. It is still going on," said Major R. R. Pande, an economics teacher at the Amethi post graduate college. "It's like an endless celebration of a wedding."

Mr Gandhi recently returned from a heart-winning tour of Karachi where he, along with his younger sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, celebrated the opening match of the rare India-Pakistan series.

The Amethi constituency includes Jagdishpur in its fold. The proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, which begins in Iran at Assaluyeh, Bandar Abbas and passes through Balochistan, will intersect with the Pakistan gas network system at Bhong before connecting to India's cross-country 1,678-mile Hazira-Bijaipur-Jagdishpur pipeline.