Lucknow: Leading with 6,84,598 votes, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is headed for a resounding win in the high-profile Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency.
He was up against Uttar Pradesh minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Dinesh Pratap Singh, his nearest rival, who is trailing with 2,95,856 votes, and Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Thakur Prasad Yadav, who has managed 21,545 votes.
Rahul had picked Rae Bareli, the party’s pocket-borough, instead of Amethi, to fight the general elections this time after his mother, Sonia Gandhi, chose the Rajya Sabha route to enter Parliament. He made his electoral debut from the Amethi constituency in 2004.
Going by the trends, Gandhi in on the course to retain one of the two Congress bastions by a record margin in Uttar Pradesh that sends the maximum number of MPs to the Parliament.
Rae Bareli & Nehru-Gandhi legacy
The Rae Bareli seat had also turned into a prestige battle for the Congress, given that several members of the Nehru-Gandhi family held the seat in the past.
Former prime minister Indira Gandhi had won the seat in 1967 and 1971, but lost in 1977, the first Lok Sabha elections after the Emergency. She had won Rae Bareli again in 1980, but had resigned from the seat to retain Medak in Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana), the other constituency she had contested from and won.
Before that, her husband Feroze Gandhi was elected as the general category representative in 1952 and 1957, when it was a two-member constituency.
Ex-PM Rajiv Gandhi’s cousin Arun Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law, Sheila Kaul, had also represented Rae Bareli in 1984 and 1989, respectively.
Between 2004 and 2024, Sonia was elected the Rae Bareli MP four times.
In 2014, Sonia had defeated BJP’s Ajay Agrawal by 3,52,713 votes, bagging a vote share of 63.8 percent. Agrawal had received 1,73,721 votes back then. Four years on, Sonia had bagged 5,34,918 votes — 55.78 percent of the total votes polled — defeating Dinesh Pratap Singh by 1,67,178 votes.
Singh, a former Congress leader, was closely involved in campaign management for the Gandhis in Rae Bareli. In 2018, he joined the BJP and was subsequently fielded against Sonia.
The margin of her victory in 2019 had, however, narrowed by eight percentage points, compared to 2014. Singh had bagged 3,67,740 votes — almost 38 percent of the total votes polled — which was the highest number of votes that any opponent had managed to get against Sonia.
Despite having the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the fray, Rahul looks set to improve the victory margin, compared to his mother.
Congress Rae Bareli district president Pankaj Tiwari told ThePrint that Rahul bettered the victory margin despite the BSP’s presence as the latter’s vote bank got shifted to the Congress.
“Last time, BSP’s votes had shifted to the BJP, but this time, even the traditional BSP voter has voted for the Congress. The BSP candidate made no difference and was totally absent from the campaigning, too,” he said.
In this election, UP Congress leaders gave credit to Rahul’s appeal and vigorous campaigning by his sister Priyanka Gandhi, who was in the constituency for over a week prior to elections, and addressed multiple public meetings for the impressive show.
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