Shashi Tharoor vs Mallikarjun Kharge: Who will Congress elect as next President today?

Change of guard at the grand old Congress party inches closer as around 9,200 delegates will vote to elect their ideal candidate for the post of the Congress party president. Candidates in the fray are Congress MPs Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor. Voting through paper ballots will begin today at 10 am and will last till 4 pm across 67 polling booths in India and results will be out on October 19.

Here’s what you need to know about the Congress presidential election:

1. Delegates from a particular state will come to state headquarters of the party to cast their votes. They will have to carry QR code-enabled ID cards and their Aadhaar card.

2. 72 per cent of the voters are male and 28 per cent of them are female. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and ex-speaker of the Karnataka Assembly Kogudu Thimmappa are the oldest voters in this election.

3. States that have the highest number of delegates are Uttar Pradesh (1,200), West Bengal (900), Maharashtra (800), Tamil Nadu (700), Bihar (600), Karnataka (500), Gujarat (400), Rajasthan (400), Odisha (400), Andhra Pradesh (350), Jharkhand (310) and Chhattisgarh (300).

4. Congress leader and former president Rahul Gandhi will cast his vote from Sanganakullu in Karnataka’s Ballari at a Bharat Jodo Yatra campsite along with 40 other Bharat Yatris.

5. Members of the Congress Working Committee – Sonia Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Manmohan Singh and some senior leaders will cast their votes in the polling booth at the Congress headquarters at 24 Akbar Road.

6. Tharoor told India Today in an exclusive interaction, “Party workers should be empowered, they should be given respect. Workers should feel that the party is willing to listen to their views. Right now, there is an impression that all decisions are taken by the top brass in Delhi.”

7. He also said that there is an urgent need to reform how the Congress party functions in order to fight against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while adding that more young people with real authority are the need of the hour.

8. Kharge told news agency ANI, “We’ve to fight from parliament to street. It’s difficult as unemployment and inflation are there, GDP growth is falling, value of rupee is going down- petrol-diesel and essential commodities’ prices are going up.”

9. These elections are not the first wherein a non-Gandhi leader is contesting for the post of Congress party president. 22 years back, Jitendra Prasad contested for the post but Sonia Gandhi won that election.

10. Sonia Gandhi held the office of the Congress Party president for almost 20 years from 1998-2017 and later in 2019. Rahul Gandhi was, however, elected as the party president in 2017 without any opposition.

(With India Today, agency inputs)

Also read: Shashi Tharoor to run for Congress president post: Sources

Also read: EC to announce assembly poll dates for Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh; check details here