Can Rahul Gandhi's potpourri of roses and roads entice Amethi's voters?

There is something about the Nehru-Gandhis and roses. If Jawaharlal insisted on buttonholing the flower and making a curious statement that was half-political , half-sartorial in a newly-independent country where floriculture was hardly a pressing concern, his great-grandson has bigger ambitions for it.

Rahul Gandhi wants a rosy future for his constituency.

At Amethi, where he laid the foundation stone for three new national highways, he dreamt of Amethi's roses landing in America, still dewy-fresh. So what if only about 2,00,000 hectares across the country are under floriculture, with roses making just a fraction of it; numbers should never come in the way of a good dream.

But Rahul Gandhi's rose economics distinctly gives off a whiff of politics, of elections around the corner. A potpourri of roses and roads can be exotic and enticing, but would that promise be enough to win back the voters?

In the 2012 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the Congress had lost eight of the 10 constituencies in the Gandhi pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareli - a canker in the bud certainly.

And, perhaps, some lessons have been learnt since his disastrous rhetoric against importing Israeli drip-irrigation technology to Bundelkhand. Psst, their greenhouses average three million roses per hectare.