Congress President Election Results: After the results of a nationwide election held two days earlier were counted, veteran party leader Mallikarjun Kharge was chosen as the new president of the Congress Party on Wednesday. He is the first non-Gandhi to hold that position in twenty years.
Mallikarjun Kharge, a senior Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, has been a Gandhi family supporter for a very long time. In 1969, he joined the Congress party. Kharge began his work as a labour union representative.
Kharge’s Background:
Kharge, a member of the Dali community, was born in 1942 in the southern state’s Bidar area. Kharge was a law student who developed a strong interest in politics early on in his academic career.
Devaraj Urs, the then-leader of the Congress party in Karnataka, persuaded Kharge to run from the Gurmitkal district, which was heavily populated by upper-caste voters, in 1972. He won that district nine times in a row. He then ran for office from Chitapur and won.
Kharge’s Political Journey
After the 2009 general elections, when he ran for and won the Gulbarga parliamentary seat to become the first member of the Lok Sabha, his journey to national politics began. In 2014, Kharge triumphed a second time. But in 2019, he fell short to the BJP. Kharge was chosen to lead the Congress party in the Lok Sabha in June 2014. Additionally, he served as the Center’s Minister of Labor and Employment and Minister of Railways in the cabinet.
The 78-year-old political veteran from Karnataka was elected to the Rajya Sabha on June 12, 2022. He was chosen to serve as the opposition’s leader in the Rajya Sabha, a position he left on October 1 of 2022 to run for president of Congress.
Since the country’s declaration of independence, the Gandhi family has been in charge of the Congress most of the time. Only six elections were held because there were multiple candidates, beginning in 1939 when Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose defeated P Sitaramayya, who was supported by Mahatma Gandhi.
Kharge was always the favourite and was widely thought to have the Gandhis’ support. Now, his victory will unavoidably give his detractors more reason to assert that the Gandhis will be in control of the party remotely.
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Shashi Tharoor, Kharge’s opponent in these party elections, however, insisted throughout the campaigning that the Gandhis had given him a commitment to be impartial.
Tharoor declared his support for reform, something political analysts say the Congress sorely needs.
Soon after the vote-counting process started on Wednesday, Tharoor claimed “very severe irregularities.” Salman Soz, a member of his campaign staff, claimed that they have discussed “many various matters” with Madhusudan Mistry, chairman of the Congress Central Election Authority.
This election was held around three years after Sonia Gandhi consented to serve as the party’s interim leader when Rahul Gandhi resigned, accepting accountability for the party’s two straight losses in the general elections of 2014 and 2019.
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