Senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge (Photo | PTI)
New Delhi: On getting elected as the new president of the Congress party, senior party leader Mallikarjun Kharge got congratulated by Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath and senior party leader Digvijaya Singh among others, PTI reported.
Kharge beat Shashi Tharoor in an electoral contest, the sixth in the party's 137-year-old history.
Former MP and CM Kamal Nath said, "I am sure that his vast experience will benefit the Congress organisation a lot, and under his able leadership, the party will not only scale new heights, it will also get strengthened further."
Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh also congratulated Kharge on getting elected as the Congress president through a democratic process, saying that the party will benefit from Kharge's rich experience.
In the state party office, leaders celebrated Kharge's victory by distributing sweets.
Earlier in the day, Congress' central election authority chairman Madhusudan Mistry announced after the counting of votes that of the 9,385 votes polled in the Congress president poll, Mr Kharge got 7,897 votes and Shashi Tharoor 1,072 votes, while 416 votes were declared invalid.
Kharge is a politician with more than 50 years of experience, the second AICC President from Karnataka after S. Nijalingappa, and the second Dalit man to hold the position after Jagjivan Ram.
Kharge was elected MLA nine times in a row, seeing a steady rise in his career graph from humble beginnings as a union leader in his home district of Gulbarga (renamed Kalaburagi).
He joined the party in 1969 and went on to become President of the Gulbarga City Congress Committee.
That Kharge was unconquerable at the hustings was mirrored until the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in which he bucked the Narendra Modi wave that swept Karnataka, particularly the Hyderabad-Karnataka region, and had won from Gulbarga with a margin of over 74,000 votes.
He won from the Gurmitkal assembly constituency nine times before he plunged into the Lok Sabha poll arena in 2009 and has been a two-time MP from Gulbarga parliamentary segment.