Highlight
- All the sealed ballot boxes have been brought to Delhi from 68 polling stations set up across the country.
- Congress has claimed that its internal democracy has no parallel with any other party
- In the nearly 137-year-old history of the Congress, 6 times the electoral contest is deciding the new President.
Congress President Election: The Congress will get its first non-Gandhi president in 24 years, the sixth in its 137-year-old history, after counting of over 9,500 votes cast to select between senior leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor.
The counting of votes cast on Monday will begin at 10 am on Wednesday at the AICC headquarters. All the sealed ballot boxes from 68 polling stations set up across the country have been brought here and kept in a “strong room” at the party office.
While Kharge is considered a favorite for his alleged closeness to the Gandhi family and the support of a large number of senior leaders, Tharoor has pitched himself as a candidate for change.
The sealed ballot boxes will be opened in front of the agents of the candidates and the ballot papers will be mixed repeatedly.
Congress Central Election Authority chairman Madhusudan Mistry expressed satisfaction over the party’s presidential election process, saying it was “free, fair and transparent”. He has also said that it was a secret ballot and no one will know who voted for whom.
A total of 9,915 Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) representatives formed an electoral college to choose the party chief in a secret ballot, more than 9,500 cast their vote at PCC offices and AICC headquarters, Mistry held a press conference after polling ended. said in. monday.
The Congress has claimed that its internal democracy has no resemblance to any other party and is the only party that has a central election authority for organizational elections.
This is the sixth time in the nearly 137-year-old history of the Congress that an electoral contest is deciding who will succeed Sonia Gandhi as the party’s president.
It was 1939, when an election contest decided who would be the president of the Congress, and Mahatma Gandhi’s candidate P Sitaramaiah was defeated by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Then came the first election of Congress for the post of party president in 1950 when Purushottam Das Tandon and Acharya Kriplani came face to face. Amazingly, Tandon, seen as a loyalist of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, won the contest, beating the likes of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
In 1977, following the resignation of Dev Kant Baruah as party president in the wake of defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, K Brahmananda Reddy defeated Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Karan Singh in the party’s election for AICC chief.
The next election that required a contest came 20 years later in 1997 when Sitaram Kesari won a triangular contest with Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot. Except for parts of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, all state Congress units had supported Kesari. He registered a landslide victory, receiving 6,224 delegate votes against Pawar’s 882 and Pilot’s 354.
The fifth contest came in 2000 and was the only time Jitendra Prasad had challenged a member of the Gandhi family in an election over Sonia Gandhi. Prasad suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Gandhi, who garnered over 7,400 votes. Prasad reportedly got only 94 votes.
The current elections are historic as the new president will replace Sonia Gandhi, the longest-serving party president, who has been in power since 1998, except for the two years between 2017 and 2019 when Rahul Gandhi took over.
The Nehru-Gandhi family has been at the helm of the party for almost 40 years since independence.
The five family members who held the post of Congress President included Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
Voters in the Congress’ presidential elections on Monday were asked to put tick marks against their candidate in the ballot paper after Tharoor’s team raised the issue of its earlier directive with the party’s apex election body. This could lead to confusion, the team said.
The political journeys of the two playwrights in the Congressional presidential elections have been different.
Kharge is a grassroots politician and a staunch loyalist of the Gandhi family, while social media pioneer and often outspoken Tharoor joined the Congress in 2009 after a long stint at the United Nations.
Ahead of the voting, Kharge had said that if he becomes the president, he will have no shame in taking the advice and support of the Gandhi family in running the affairs of the party.
Tharoor, on his part, took a veiled dig at some senior leaders who had supported Kharge, saying some of his colleagues were indulging in ‘netagiri’ and telling party workers that they knew whom Sonia Gandhi wanted to elect.
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