Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is currently leading in the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency by a margin of over 4,10,000 votes, data from the Election Commission showed at 3 pm.
Vadra, in her electoral debut, is on course to winning the seat by an even greater margin than her brother, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who had defeated the Communist Party of India’s Annie Raja by a margin of 3.6 lakh votes in the general election. He had represented the seat from 2019 till this year’s Lok Sabha election.
At 3 pm on Saturday, Vadra had secured 6,22,338 of the total votes counted.
Communist Party of India candidate Sathyan Mokeri was trailing by 4,10,931 votes. Mokeri is a former MLA who represented the Nadapuram Assembly seat for three terms between 1987 and 2001
In the 2024 general elections, Gandhi won the Wayanad and the Rae Bareli seats but had to retain just one of the constituencies as per the Representation of the People Act.
The bye-election in Wayanad was necessitated after Rahul Gandhi chose to represent Rae Bareli in the Lok Sabha. In the Rae Bareli election, he had defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Dinesh Pratap Singh by 3.9 lakh votes.
The Congress had announced in June that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will contest the bye-poll.