Mallikarjun Kharge becomes the new Congress president
On Wednesday, October 19, Mallikarjun Kharge (80), a veteran leader from Karnataka and the former Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha (till he resigned to fight for the presidency), was elected the Indian National Congress president, becoming the first non-Gandhi leader in 24 years to occupy the party’s top post.
Sitaram Kesri was the last non-Gandhi leader to be president, from 1996 to 1998.
This was only the sixth time in the nearly 137-year-old history of the Congress that the party witnessed an electoral contest for the top post. The first presidential election was held in 1939, when Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose defeated Mahatma Gandhi’s candidate P Sitaramayya.
Kharge will take charge on October 26 to become the 18th party president since independence. The election was held on October 17.
He defeated Kerala Lok Sabha MP, Shashi Tharoor, winning 7,897 votes against Tharoor’s 1,072. A total of 9,385 were votes polled.
Mallikarjun Kharge was considered the unofficial establishment candidate, having the strong backing of the Gandhi family and its close allies.
Outgoing president Sonia Gandhi, her daughter Priyanka and losing candidate Shashi Tharoor, among others, visited Kharge’s residence yesterday to congratulate him.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi too tweeted a congratulatory message, wishing him a fruitful tenure.
An important thing to remember in this election is that though he lost convincingly, Tharoor’s winning 1,072 delegate votes, representing about 12 per cent of the valid votes (11.42 per cent, to be exact), is a decent performance if one compares it with the losing candidates from the past two elections.
While Sharad Pawar managed 882 votes and Rajesh Pilot 354 in 1997, against Sitaram Kesri’s 6,224, in 2000, Jitendra Prasada fared much worse, winning a paltry 94 against Sonia Gandhi’s 7,448.
Another point that needs to be made, with respect to Tharoor, is that, though he reportedly expected it, those who didn’t were taken by surprise when leading lights of G-23—or the group of 23 leaders (which included Tharoor) which had written a letter to then party president Sonia Gandhi in 2020 seeking organisational reforms—such as Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Anand Sharma, Manish Tewari and Prithviraj Chavan, rallied behind Kharge by signing his nomination papers as proposers.
