Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday won the Wayanad Lok Sabha bye-election by a margin of over 4,10,000 votes, data from the Election Commission showed.
Vadra, in her electoral debut, won the seat with 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 earlier this year. He had represented the seat from 2019 till this year’s Lok Sabha election.
Vadra secured 6,22,338 votes of the total votes counted.
Communist Party of India candidate Sathyan Mokeri trailed 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 defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Dinesh Pratap Singh by 3.9 lakh votes.
The Congress had announced in June that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would contest the bye-poll.