BJP's candidate Atul Garg leads in Ghaziabad by over 2,60,000 votes

Atul Garg, who replaced former Union minister V K Singh as BJP's Ghaziabad Lok Sabha candidate, is leading by a margin of over 2.66 lakh votes, according to poll trends on the Election Commission's website on Tuesday.

Until 4 pm, Garg has polled over 6.80 lakh votes as compared to Congress' Dolly Sharma who has bagged 4.13 lakh votes and Bahujan Samaj Party's Nand Kishor Pundir who got 66,226 votes.

Besides them, a total of 11 other candidates are in the fray from the western Uttar Pradesh constituency but none could garner even 2,000 votes till 4 pm.

The NOTA (none of the above) option bagged the fourth highest number of votes -- 6,644 even as the counting continued.

Singh, a former Army chief, had won from Ghaziabad by a margin of over 5 lakh votes in both the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 and 2019.

Garg, a sitting MLA in Uttar Pradesh from the Ghaziabad seat, was declared BJP's Lok Sabha candidate on March 24, within hours of Singh's announcement that he would not contest the parliamentary elections.