THE Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) are leading in 61 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, according to Election Commission trends at 03.30 pm Indian standard time.
Prime minister Narendra Modi is leading by a huge margin of over 400000 votes in Varanasi against Samajwadi Party candidate Shalini Yadav.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi continued to trail in Amethi, where union minister and BJP candidate Smriti Irani is leading by over 16000 votes.
The BJP is ahead in 60 seats and Apna Dal (S) in one seat.
The SP-BSP-RLD alliance is leading in 18 seats. Mayawati's BSP is ahead in 12 seats, while Akhilesh Yadav's SP is leading in six seats.
The Congress is leading on only one seat, Rae Bareli, where UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi is ahead of the BJP's Dinesh Pratap Singh by over 116000 votes.
RLD chief Ajit Singh and his son, Jayant Chowdhury, are trailing from Muzaffarnagar and Baghpat respectively.
It was mixed fortune for the Yadav clan, with two senior leaders Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav maintaining their leads.
SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is leading by over 120000 votes in Azamgarh, while his father and SP patron Mulayam Singh Yadav is ahead by nearly 28,000 votes.
Akhilesh Yadav's cousins, Dharmendra Yadav and Akshay Yadav, and wife Dimple Yadav are trailing respectively from Badaun, Firozabad and Kannauj seats.
SP leader Azam Khan is leading in Rampur by over 140000 votes over BJP candidate Jaya Prada, who switched sides from the SP to join the saffron party ahead of the Lok Sabha election.
Kunwar Danish Ali, who joined the BSP after leaving the JDS, is leading by over 60,000 votes in Amroha.
State BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey is leading by more than 9,000 votes in Chandauli.
Union ministers Rajnath Singh and Santosh Gangwar are leading in their respective seats of Lucknow and Bareily.
But another union minister, Manoj Sinha, was trailing in Ghazipur, where mafia-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari's brother, Afzal Ansari, of the BSP is leading by over 45,000 votes.
In Gorakhpur and Phulpur, where the opposition had unseated the BJP in bypolls, the saffron party appeared to be taking sweet revenge by leading at both the places.
Kairana was, however, an exception where sitting Samajwadi Party MP Tabassum Begum is maintaining a lead over the BJP, which had lost in a bypoll to Begum.
Sitting BJP MP Hema Malini is leading by 200000 votes against SP-BSP-RLD alliance candidate Kunwar Narendra Singh in Mathura.
(PTI)
The thunderstorms are expected to subside from the west during the mid-afternoonMet Office
