Rae Bareli Lok Sabha Exit Poll Results 2024: Rahul Gandhi doing well in tough fight with BJP's Dinesh Pratap Singh, says India Today-Axis My India data

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is doing well in a tough fight against Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Dinesh Pratap Singh. Notably, the BJP has repeated Singh's ticket from the seat. He also contested against Sonia Gandhi from the seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Moreover, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is likely to bag around 64-67 whereas the Samajwadi Party is expected to win 7-9 out of 80 seats. The Congress is likely to win in 1-3 seats and the BSP in 0-1 constituencies in the country's most populous state. 

The BJP is expected to get nearly 46 per cent vote share, followed by the Samajwadi Party at around 30 per cent. The Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party are expected to get a vote share of 8 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively.

In Uttar Pradesh, all eyes are on the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat, which was chosen as the safe seat for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at the very last minute Rae Bareli has been a hot seat in the Lok Sabha elections.

Till the last day of filing the nominations for the fifth phase, there was uncertainty over who will be the Congress party's candidate from the high-profile seat. After much ado, Rahul Gandhi's name was finally announced on the last day of filing the nomination.

Here, the Gandhi scion is faced with a spirited challenge from BJP's Dinesh Pratap Singh. During his electoral campaign, Singh has time and again pointed out the Gandhi family's absence and the lack of development in the Congress' blue-eyed seat. 

He has been maintaining that the so-called Congress fortress is not impregnable. The Congress' campaign, on the other hand, was led by Rahul Gandhi's sister and former UP Congress in-charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who stationed herself in the constituency for more than a week. During her campaign, Vadra raked up her family legacy for the most part.

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi held the Rae Bareli seat from 2004-2024, when she decided to go to Rajya Sabha instead citing ill health. Despite her successive victories from Rae Bareli, her vote share has been declining from nearly 72 per cent in 2009 to around 56 per cent in 2019.

The high-profile Lok Sabha constituency has 9.59 lakh voters. Of this, around 30 per cent belong to Scheduled Castes and 12 per cent are Muslims. Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat has around 11 per cent Brahmin voters and 11 per cent Rajput voters along with 9 per cent of them belonging to the Yadav community. 

The constituency comprises five assembly segments- Bachhrawan, Harchandpur, Rae Bareli, Sareni, and Unchahar. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Sonia Gandhi won the seat by a margin of more than 1.5 lakh votes against BJP's Dinesh Pratap Singh.