Journalism of Courage
As expected, Mallikarjun Kharge was on Wednesday elected the Congress president beating Shashi Tharoor in a tightly fought contest. The veteran, who won 7,897 of the valid votes (84.14 per cent) of the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates to Tharoor’s 1,072 (11.4 per cent), takes over as the first non-Gandhi chief of the party in two-and-a-half decades.
While Kharge’s victory was no less than a landslide, Tharoor managed to cross the 1,000 vote mark, surprising many in the party.
Although the composition and the numbers of the electoral college were different and there can be no comparison, Tharoor managed to garner more votes than Sharad Pawar when the latter contested against Sitaram Kesri in 1997.
The last time a contest took place for the Congress presidency was in 2000 when Jitendra Prasada faced off with Sonia. He was defeated by 7,448 votes to 94. In 1997, Kesri had defeated heavyweights Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot easily, with 6,224 votes against Pawar’s 882 and Pilot’s 354 respectively.
As the results became clear, Tharoor congratulated Kharge and thanked the delegates who supported him.
“It is a great honour and a huge responsibility to be President of the Indian National Congress and I wish Mallikarjun Kharge all success in that task. It was a privilege to have received the support of over a thousand colleagues, and to carry the hopes and aspirations of so many well-wishers of Congress across India,” he said in a Twitter post.
“The decision of the party delegates is final and I accept it humbly. It is a privilege to be a member of a party that allows its workers to choose their president,” he said in a statement.
“Our new president is a party colleague and senior who brings ample leadership and experience to the table. Under his guidance, I am confident that we can all collectively take the party to new heights,” he added.
But the election was bitterly fought to the last day with the Tharoor campaign raising concerns several times. Even on the eve of the counting, it wrote to Madhusudan Mistry, the head of the Congress’s election authority, pointing out “extremely serious irregularities” in the conduct of the election in Uttar Pradesh. The Tharoor campaign demanded that the votes from UP be deemed invalid.
Mistry, while announcing the results of the elections, said the charges levelled in the letter by the Tharoor camp have “no basis” and asserted he will give a point-by-point reply to Tharoor. “It is more of a general complaint…it is not specific in nature…he should have told us personally,” he said. He hinted that it was the Tharoor camp which leaked the letter. “It is an internal matter. That he has made it public does not mean I have to make it (the response) public,” he said.
The letter by Tharoor’s campaign manager Salman Anees Soz to Mistry said “the facts are damning and the election process in UP is devoid of credibility and integrity.” The first complaint was regarding the use of unofficial tags to seal the ballot boxes in Uttar Pradesh. The Tharoor campaign attached photographs of what they called unofficial tags used in UP to seal the boxes.
Soz said the “lack of official seals on any of the six ballot boxes, makes the voting in UP void”. The second aspect was about the “presence of unofficial persons in polling booths.” The complaint said three persons in addition to the polling agents sat inside the polling booths and “they were acting like the presiding officers whose role was to check the delegate card of the voters and match them with their government ID cards…”
“Without exception these people are influential local leaders and national and state office bearers. One of them Omveer Yadav is a proposer of Mallikarjun Kharge…Without the consent of a candidate, how can persons beyond PROs, APROs, and DROs and official polling agents be allowed to be inside a polling booth? We don’t have to tell you what they were doing in the polling booth. They were certainly not there to promote the candidacy of our candidate,” the letter said.
“We suspect voter fraud in this election. There were delegates who were not present in the Lucknow area on the day of voting and their votes were cast. There were complaints from people about not being allowed to cast their votes since others had already cast their votes,” the letter said.
“When our agents complained about voter malpractice, supporters of the other side would come inside the polling booth and create a ruckus and start threatening our polling agents. We have specific examples of people who were not in Lucknow on polling day and their ballots were recorded as having been cast. We will not disclose those examples to you at this time to protect our sources and to make sure that there is no attempt to fix such issues by those who have committed such malpractices,” the letter said.
The letter also said AICC secretaries in charge of Uttar Pradesh but belonging to different states were present at the PCC headquarters in Lucknow in violation of the guidelines issued by the election authority. “We have the sad duty to inform you that Pradeep Narwal, Tauqueer Alam and Dheeraj Gurjar were present in the different polling booths in Lucknow and they were not there for any other reason but to influence voters,” it said.
“Other senior leaders (AICC and PCC) were observed in and around polling booths instructing voters to vote a certain way. That AICC secretaries would violate the spirit of your instructions… shows us the impunity with which some of our colleagues operate,” it said.
