A day after the announcement of the Lok Sabha poll results, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra penned a heartfelt note to her brother, Rahul Gandhi, celebrating his victories.
Rahul Gandhi won both the Lok Sabha seats he contested Wayanad and family stronghold Rae Bareli.
Praising Rahul, Priyanka highlighted his resilience in the face of intense opposition. “You kept standing, no matter what they said and did to you…. You never backed down whatever the odds, never stopped believing however much they doubted your conviction, you never stopped fighting for the truth despite the overwhelming propaganda of lies they spread, and you never allowed anger and hatred to overcome you, even when they gifted it to you every day," Priyanka wrote in a post on X.
“You fought with love, truth and kindness in your heart. Those who could not see you, see you now, but some of us have always seen and known you to be the bravest of all,” she added, expressing her pride in being his sister.
Rahul Gandhi won the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat by a margin of more than 3.6 lakh votes and the Rae Bareli seat by over 3.9 lakh votes. The Congress party also improved its overall tally from the 2019 general election, winning over 99 seats compared to 52 in the previous election.
Five years ago, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi had won the Rae Bareli seat by a margin of 1,67,178 votes against Dinesh Pratap Singh. Sonia Gandhi, who had been elected to the Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli continuously since 2004, vacated the seat earlier this year after she was elected to the Rajya Sabha.
Rae Bareli was the only Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh that the Congress had won in 2019. Rahul Gandhi represented the Amethi seat in the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2019. In the 2019 general election, he lost the seat to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Smriti Irani but was elected to the Lok Sabha from Wayanad in Kerala.