Congress party has elected Mallikarjun Kharge as its first non-Gandhi president in more than two decades. Kharge won a landslide victory, securing eight times more votes than Shashi Tharoor.
On Monday, around 9,500 Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates from across India voted to elect a new party president, making a choice between Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor to succeed Sonia Gandhi. Mallikarjun Kharge got 7897 votes, while Shashi Tharoor won 1072 votes. 416 votes were rejected, according to reports.
Mallikarjun Kharge is replacing Sonia Gandhi, who has been the longest-serving president of the Congress party. She has been leading the party since 1998, barring the two years between 2017 and 2019 when her son Rahul Gandhi was made the president.
Shashi Tharoor had positioned himself as a candidate for change, emphasizing the need for a change in how the party operates, whereas Mallikarjun Kharge was known as the ‘unofficial official candidate’ due to his unfaltering loyalty to the Gandhi family.
After the results of the elections came out, the Congress MP and party president candidate Shashi Tharoor congratulated Mallikarjun Kharge. He said that decision of the party delegates is final and he accepts it humbly.
“It is a great honor & a huge responsibility to be President of @INCIndia &I wish @Kharge ji all success in that task. It was a privilege to have received the support of over a thousand colleagues,& to carry the hopes& aspirations of so many well-wishers of Congress across India,” Tharoor tweeted.
It is a great honour & a huge responsibility to be President of @INCIndia &I wish @Kharge ji all success in that task. It was a privilege to have received the support of over a thousand colleagues,& to carry the hopes& aspirations of so many well-wishers of Congress across India. pic.twitter.com/NistXfQGN1
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) October 19, 2022
Tharoor thanked Sonia Gandhi for her leadership of the party for a quarter of a century and thanked Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi for ensuring free and neutral elections. However, he acknowledged that the party will continue to be actually led by the Gandhi family ever after the election of a new president. He said he hopes and believes that the family will remain the foundational pillar of the Congress, their moral conscience and ultimate guiding spirit. He added, “In particular, the spectacular success of the ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra is a testament to the family’s enduring appeal to the masses.”
Even though both candidates maintained that interim Congress President Sonia Gandhi was completely impartial during this election, Shashi Tharoor claimed that several state party chiefs were unavailable to meet him when he visited their states, even though they showed their support and met Mallikarjun Kharge when he went there to seek support.
The party presidential election has been marred by controversy since its inception, which was necessitated after former president Rahul Gandhi resigned in July 2019 following the party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. Following this, Sonia Gandhi was appointed as the party’s interim president.
Then there was the G23 (Group of 23 Leaders) crisis. Following the debacle of the Lok Sabha elections, the G-23 leaders wrote to Congress interim chief Sonia Gandhi in August 2020, requesting an organisational overhaul and internal elections at all levels. With the exception of a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and a closed-door session with Rahul Gandhi, this elicited little response from the leadership, resulting into to increased internal conflict.
Sonia Gandhi has been the President of the Congress for the past two decades. In fact, the Nehru-Gandhi family has ruled the party since 1978, with the exception of brief periods between 1992 and 1998 when PV Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri were in charge. Sitaram Kesri was the last non-Gandhi family leader to hold the top leadership position of the Congress party, and his departure was one of the most controversial.
