AMETHI, India — Naimesh Prasad Pandey, a 60-year-old farmer, can testify to the generations of love that people here have reserved for the Gandhi family.

He remembers, with painful clarity, that he was working in his fields in 1984 when the news came over his transistor radio that Indira Gandhi had been shot by one of her bodyguards, an event that cast him into a state of despair that, he said, did not lift for more than a year. Seven years later, the same transistor radio — “my constant companion,” he called it — carried the news of her son Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. After that “most heinous of crimes,” he said, he felt a swelling of love and loyalty toward Rajiv’s children, in particular the boy, Rahul, who, as an adult, would run for Parliament from the Amethi constituency.

So it was noticeable this week, on the day voters went to the polls in Amethi, that Mr. Pandey’s face set into a cold mask when he was asked whether he would be voting for Rahul Gandhi, who is running for the third time in this constituency. Mr. Pandey pointed at the pools of stagnant, trash-clogged water that stand on the city’s main street, and the men gathered around him chimed in with their own complaints until it was difficult to hear anyone at all.