Mallikarjun Kharge wins Congress Presidential elections, set to become first non-Gandhi head of party in 24 years

Mallikarjun Kharge has won the Congress Presidential elections by a landslide margin with 7,897 votes, senior leader Pramod Tiwari announced.

Rival candidate Shashi Tharoor has congratulated President-elect Kharge and said that the revival of the party has truly begun today.

Kharge will be the first non-Gandhi president of the party in 24 years.

All sealed ballot boxes from the 68 polling booths set up across the country had been brought here by Tuesday evening and kept in a “strong room” at the party office.

The counting agents of Kharge are Pramod Tiwari, Kodikunil Suresh, Gaurav Gogoi, Syed Nasir Hussain, Kuljit Singh Bagra and Gurdeep Singh Sappal.

Karti Chidambaram, Atul Chaturvedi and Sumedh Gaikwal are among those who are counting agents of Tharoor.

Congress central election authority chairman Madhusudan Mistry has expressed satisfaction with the party’s presidential polls process, saying it was “free, fair and transparent”.

He has also said it was a secret ballot and no one would get to know who voted for whom.

Of the total 9,915 Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates that formed the electoral college to pick the party chief in a secret ballot, over 9,500 cast their ballot at PCC offices and the AICC headquarters, Mistry had said at a press conference after the polling ended on Monday.