CONTINUITY VS CHANGE

Most party leaders acknowledge Kharge as the frontrunner, but Tharoor's candidature is generating some much-needed buzz within the party

- SONI MISHRA

Veteran Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge won his first assembly election in 1972 and repeated the feat a record eight times. He won the parliamentary polls in 2009 and 2014; it was in 2019 that he suffered his first electoral defeat. In the Congress presidential election, scheduled for October 17, his opponent Shashi Tharoor is a relative newcomer.

Their political experience is not the only area where the two candidates differ-they also have distinct personalities and are from disparate backgrounds. They are the two poles in an election that has generated immense buzz. A key reason for the interest is novelty, because it is after 22 years that the grand old party is having a presidential election. And, it will be after 24 years that a non-Gandhi becomes president.

Kharge, 80, who resigned as leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha after he filed his nomination, has vast experience as an administrator and organisation man. He was the home minister in the S.M. Krishna government in Karnataka and a Union minister in the Manmohan Singh regime. It is said that the one post he really wanted was chief minister of Karnataka, but he lost out to other claimants on more than one occasion.

Thiruvananthapuram MP Tharoor, 66, is a former international civil servant. A third-term MP, he has served as Union minister of state for human resource development and later external affairs in the Manmohan Singh government. Like Kharge, there is a post he coveted and failed to winTharoor finished a close second to Ban Ki-moon in the United Nations secretary general's election in 2006.