New Delhi: His victory may be widely perceived as a foregone conclusion, but 80-year-old Congress president hopeful Mallikarjun Kharge, who entered the fray only at the very last minute, isn’t leaving anything to chance.
Kharge resigned from the post of leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha immediately after filing his nomination for the presidential election, and is now travelling the country with the target of meeting as many Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates as possible to deliver his message of “main nahin, hum” (not I, but us).
He has so far held 12 meetings, covering 18 states and Union territories. Five more are planned, as is an appearance at the Bellary leg of the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra, currently underway.
On Tuesday, Kharge held meetings in two states — Patna in Bihar, and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.
There aren’t many precedents for an election to elect the Congress president. In the party’s 137-year history, this is only the fifth time that such an election is being held, and this tradition of consensus is one of the key messages Kharge and his team are trying to deliver.
In Delhi, a control room manned by 20-25 people is calling every one of the 9,850 PCC delegates who will vote in the Congress presidential elections on 17 October to tell them about this candidate who is “stable, dependable, has a long history in the Congress party and also the experience of fighting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as leader of the opposition in both the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.”
According to sources who were present at the meetings Kharge has held so far, he speaks about how he’d originally wanted one of the Gandhis to contest, but gave in to requests from friends and colleagues to contest himself, sacrificing even the post of leader of the opposition and its perks to serve the party.
Even as social media is abuzz with photos of Kharge on a chartered flight, sources in the Congress say he has taken these only twice so far, choosing to travel largely by commercial flights.
A senior Congress leader, closely associated with the Kharge campaign, said: “It is only when he can’t reach the venues on time that he has taken chartered flights — only twice so far. He has held 10 meetings, one each in Gujarat, West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Delhi. He is holding two more today [Tuesday] in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. There were two meetings in Maharashtra and one meeting for all the northeastern states.”
“He will hold another five in the coming days and probably join the Bellary leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra on 15 October. The plan is to cover at least 90 per cent of the states before the election,” he said.
The Kharge campaign is being coordinated by a campaign committee comprising “about five to six members”, a social media team and a media management team, the leader added.
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‘Main nahin, hum’
In the states he is travelling to, the PCCs are providing logistical support while a “group of friends” of Kharge are reaching out to delegates to prime them for the meeting. Attendance is not 100 per cent, said sources.
“You cannot force anyone to attend but we are trying our very best because the Congress tradition has been one of consensus,” said another senior Congress leader. “Unlike the other candidate, he never says in a meeting that I will do this. It is always ‘we will together’ fight the BJP-RSS and this is the time when ‘all hands’ need to be on the deck to steer the party in these difficult times,” said a Congress leader associated with the campaign.
The campaign is also keeping a close eye on the Tharoor camp, and senior leaders concede that Tharoor is generating a lot of eyeballs.
“A section of the party thinks he is building a profile for himself really with this contest. But our advantage is that he often seems to be talking to the people at large rather than Congress cadres, but we have somebody [Kharge] who speaks the language of the masses, has been in politics for 55 years and stuck to the Congress through thick and thin. His sagacity, his openness and his ability to take everyone along is what will see him thorough,” said another senior Congress leader.
He quoted what senior leader Janardan Dwivedi had said to PCC delegates in a meeting in Delhi over the weekend. “If you distill the soul of the Congress from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and put it in a mould, that is Mallikarjun Kharge.”
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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