LUCKNOW: “Kaun kehta hai aasmaan mein surakh nahi ho sakta? (Who says you can’t punch a hole in the sky?).” With these words, Smriti Irani proved herself to be a giant killer, forcing Rahul Gandhi to concede defeat in Amethi, much in the manner of Raj Narain , who vanquished Indira Gandhi in Raebareli in 1977.The defeat of the Congress party president reverberated across the country, reflecting its crushing defeat across the heartland and the inheritor’s inability to revive the fortunes of what had once been the natural party of governance. Amethi wasn’t any old Nehru-Gandhi pocket borough — before Rahul, it had elected his mother Sonia, before that his father Rajiv and even before that his uncle Sanjay.The victory was no flash in the pan — both the party and the candidate had worked assiduously since 2014.They cultivated the people of Amethi ever since Irani had been defeated by Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 election, when Narendra Modi had first swept all before him.In many ways, Amethi is an allegory. The Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) and its top brass put in an all-round effort over the past five years to ensure this win. Irani made multiple visits to Amethi after her loss to launch central development schemes in the constituency, which hadn’t got that kind of attention under its Congress custodians.While Narendra Modi visited for the first time for a public rally earlier this year, party president Amit Shah and state chief minister Yogi Adityanath made multiple trips over the last two years to rally the BJP cadre and send a message to the people of Amethi.“Amethi is winnable—that was the mantra to party workers right from the top. Smriti was the new didi of Amethi while Rahul bhaiyya was now the lapata saansad (missing MP) for people,” a BJP leader in Lucknow told ET.Rahul Gandhi’s decision to pick Wayanad as a second seat also fed into the BJP’s alienation narrative—he feared a punishing defeat in Amethi. Irani drummed this into voters at nearly every public meeting and it resonated with them. The people of Amethi had told ET that they were apprehensive about Gandhi giving up the Amethi seat if he won from both, tying into BJPs “missing MP” pitch.It didn’t help that signs of resignation seemed to be visible in the Congress camp. After being largely missing from the trail in Amethi, which was largely handled by his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rahul Gandhi came to the constituency on the last day of campaigning to attend a women workers’ meeting while Amit Shah and Irani held a big roadshow. Mayawati uncharacteristically issued a message at the fag end of the campaign that Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party (SP-BSP) workers should back Gandhi in Amethi, which smacked of a “deal”—something Irani had been vociferous about. She had cited an interview by Mulayam Singh Yadav in which he said that Sonia Gandhi had requested him in 2014 to help transfer SP’s votes to ensure a win for Rahul Gandhi.While the Samajwadi Party did not contest Amethi as it had done earlier, the alliance still appeared to nurse a bitterness toward the Congress that damaged Gandhi’s chances.“The fact is that Rahul Gandhi used to win in Amethi earlier as SP always helped transfer votes to him. His margin though got reduced to about one lakh votes in 2014,” one senior SP leader told ET.Irani has achieved what stalwarts such as Kanshi Ram, Sharad Yadav and Rajmohan Gandhi could not—all of them have lost from Amethi in the past.In any case, the BJP was convinced that the arithmetic in Amethi had come to be loaded against Gandhi. Four out of the five assembly segments in Amethi had been won by the BJP in the 2017 state legislature polls, up from none in 2014. That the Congress could not win any of the five assembly seats in 2017 was a direct result of the work done by the BJP since 2014 as it prepared the ground for the next general election. Local elections that followed the 2017 assembly polls saw further signs of the BJP’s ascendance and the Congress decline. The BJP won the Amethi Nagar Panchayat for the first time. The Congress candidate lost the Gauriganj Nagar Palika chairman seat in Amethi district. Gauriganj is where the Congress Amethi district office is located.While Congress continued to assume that the family loyalty factor would continue to work, Irani stressed how a record number of toilets and houses had been built by the Centre for the poor in Amethi since the Modi government came to power. Rahul Gandhi, she said, had failed to deliver on such amenities for years.Irani also made herself accessible to people of the constituency who visited her in Delhi, helping out if they needed hospital admission in the capital or putting in a word when someone wanted a school admission for their child in Amethi. She pursued ministers in Delhi to get projects approved for Amethi, like a new train stop in Jyas or a CT scan machine for the district or bringing power to 121 non-electrified gram panchayats. The BJP also undermined projects launched by the Nehru-Gandhis in Amethi, saying that it was the BJP that had either completed or fasttracked them. It also derided the poor infrastructure that Amethi had before the BJP came to power in Uttar Pradesh.Finally, what counted was this--Irani’s presence and Gandhi’s absence. The former television actress said how people in all the 850-odd gram panchayats in Amethi had seen her in person in the past five years but had not seen Gandhi in the last 15. That showed he didn’t care about them. She did. Family loyalty didn’t count.