Rahul Gandhi leading in Wayanad, Rae Bareli comfortably

Wayanad: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is leading in the Lok Sabha seat of Wayanad with 1, 12,365 votes as of counting till 11 am. He is also leading in Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh as counting of votes for the 2024 general elections is underway.

Rahul Gandhi is facing CPI's Annie Raja and BJP leader K Surendran in the constituency. The polling in Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency was held in the second phase on April 26 along with five other 19 constituencies of the State.

Rahul Gandhi is leading from Uttar Pradesh's Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat with a margin of 28,326 votes. Thakur Prasad Yadav is contesting from the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Around 642 million people voted in Lok Sabha elections held over seven phases in a mammoth six-week period. The counting of votes began starting with postal ballot papers amid tight security.

The Congress has fielded its sitting MP Rahul Gandhi, while, the CPI has fielded its senior leader, Annie Raja. The BJP left no stone unturned to establish its complete dominance in the 2024 elections and fielded Kerala State President K Surendran as a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate from the constituency.

Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi who is the current sitting MP of Wayanad, won the elections securing 706,367 votes, while LDF candidate P P Suneer secured 274,597 votes and BDJ (S) leader Tushar Vellapally got 78,816 votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi won from Wayanad with a huge margin of over 4.31 lakh votes- the highest margin in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Kerala. He secured 64.7 percent vote share, defeating LDF candidate P P Suneer.

Annie Raja is the wife of CPI general secretary D Raja and holds the post of general secretary in the party's National Federation of Indian Women.

(With inputs from PTI)