Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi will on Wednesday file her nomination papers for the Rajya Sabha elections from Rajasthan.

This will mark an end to her 24 years of electoral politics that began with simultaneous victories from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and Bellary in Karnataka in 1999.

She had defeated senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj from Bellary.

Sonia Gandhi retained Amethi and vacated the seat for her son Rahul Gandhi in 2004. She then shifted to Rae Bareli and had represented the constituency in the Lok Sabha since then.

Both Amethi and Rae Bareli were the family pocket boroughs of the Gandhi family till 2019 when BJP's Smriti Irani defeated Rahul Gandhi from Amethi by over 50,000 votes.

However, Rahul Gandhi had then won from Wayanad in Kerala.

The buzz around Sonia Gandhi not contesting the Lok Sabha elections had been going on for some time given that her health conditions do not permit her to travel much.

Barring Karnataka in 2018 and 2023  and Telangana in 2023, Sonia Gandhi, 77, had skipped campaigning in all state elections after she was forced to call off a road show in Varanasi midway due to ill health on August 2, 2016. The event was to launch the party’s poll campaign in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections.

With Sonia Gandhi opting out of the race, her daughter and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra may fill in by contesting either from Rae Bareli or from Amethi.

Congress leaders from Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh had requested her to contest from their respective states. However, she opted for Rajasthan to send a message that the Gandhi family does not want to abandon the Hindi heartland and would continue to represent the cow belt in Parliament.

After the assassination of her husband and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, Sonia Gandhi had repeatedly turned down appeals to join the Congress till 1997 when she finally agreed to enter politics.

In March 1998, she was elected as the Congress president and held the post till December 2017 when Rahul Gandhi took over but came back as the party chief in August 2020 till October 2023.