Days after Ghulam Nabi Azad’s resignation, a prominent Congress leader is yet again in the news. This time, the issue is not a departure but rather the possibility of advancement inside the venerable old party. According to Shashi Tharoor’s most recent piece in the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubhumi, he may be considering running for party president.
However, when questioned about it by reporters on Tuesday, the Thiruvananthapuram MP said he had “no comment to make” but accepted what he had written. The Congress leader stated in an article he wrote on Monday that an “open and fair election process would be a healthy approach to go about settling the issue” of dissatisfaction among certain party officials. He would not, however, say whether he would enter the race or not.
“I’ve absolutely no comment to make. I accept what I’ve written in my article, which is that an election would be a good thing for the Congress party,” he said, speaking to media people in Thiruvananthapuram.
According to Tharoor in the Mathrubhumi piece, the party should have ideally announced elections for the dozen seats on the CWC itself that are up for election. Allowing party members drawn from the AICC and PCC delegates to decide who will lead the party from these key positions, according to Tharoor, who was one of the 23 leaders who wrote to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in 2020 demanding organisational reforms, would have helped legitimise the incoming set of leaders and given them a credible mandate to lead the party.
“Still, electing a fresh president is a start towards the revitalisation the Congress badly needs,” he said, highlighting that he or she “should have a plan to fix what ails the party, as well as a vision for India. After all, a political party is an instrument to serve the country, not an end in itself.”
Regarding the recent departure of party veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, Tharoor stated that this was just the most recent in a string of departures that had been feeding daily obituaries for the party and endless media speculation. “In either case, a fair election process would be a constructive method to resolve the conflict. It would validate the task being given to the incoming leader,” added Tharoor.
The Congress declared on Sunday that its presidential election would take place on October 17 and noted that it was the only party in the nation to conduct such a democratic process. On October 19, the results will be made public. Some politicians want Rahul Gandhi to take the lead once more.
