Mallikarjun Kharge with Rahul Gandhi on his march across India. Pic: Twitter / Kharge
India’s Congress party elected its first leader from outside the Nehru-Gandhi family in over two decades, but the move is unlikely to help the already decimated party pose a challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2024 general election.
Some 9,000 delegates voted in the election to pick veteran lawmaker Mallikarjun Kharge, 80, as party president. He defeated diplomat-turned-politician Shashi Tharoor, the head of the party’s election authority said Wednesday.
The Congress party is struggling to reclaim lost ground after suffering its worst-ever defeat in the 2014 elections that brought Modi to power. Its seat count in parliament has dropped now to 52 from 206 when it won a second term in 2009. It hasn’t fared any better in local polls-- losing 39 of the 49 state elections since 2014. Several senior leaders have also quit in the last few years.
A new president is unlikely to be able to turn the party’s fortunes or to push the Nehru-Gandhi family, that’s dominated the party and Indian politics since freedom from British rule in 1947, away from center-stage.
"The Congress presidential elections are unlikely to change the fate of the party or remove the ambiguity of authority at its helm,” said Gilles Verniers, assistant professor of political science at the Ashoka University.
"The Gandhis will continue to lead the party but not from a position of formal responsibility.”
Kharge, the leader of opposition in the upper house of parliament, is seen as a loyalist of the family. In interviews ahead of the vote he has said that he would continue to seek advice from former interim party head, Sonia Gandhi, 75 and her son Rahul Gandhi, 52. Sonia is the widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Their son Rahul is the great grandson and grandson of former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.
Tharoor, 66, an urbane former UN diplomat who joined the Congress party and entered electoral politics only in 2009, had campaigned on a more independent plank.
The party has been without a full-time president since 2019 when Rahul Gandhi stepped aside after its electoral rout at the hands of Modi’s fiercely combative and resource-rich Bharatiya Janata Party. He had taken over the job from his mother in 2017.
Since early September Rahul Gandhi has been on a 3,500 kilometer-long (2,175 miles) march across the country to revive his party’s fortunes and highlight what he has described as the socially divisive agenda of Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP.
Kharge’s elevation to top post "in itself would not necessarily be a bad idea, as the Congress badly needs a fully dedicated organization builder,” Verniers said. "But this is not what this election is explicitly about, promising instead a transformation that cannot be achieved as long as the Gandhi family remains in command.”
