Digvijaya Singh declared on Thursday that he will run for the Congress president’s post, The veteran leader is set to take on Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor in the election scheduled for October 17.
Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, who initially appeared to be the frontrunner, announced on Thursday that he will not contest, taking moral responsibility for the political crisis in his state.
After meeting party interim president Sonia Gandhi, Gehlot told reporters that he apologised to her for the developments on Sunday when MLAs supporting him defied the central observers and thwarted their move to hold a meeting of party legislators over a purported bid to make Sachin Pilot the Rajasthan chief minister.
With Gehlot virtually out, Digvijaya Singh’s bid has added a fresh twist to the Congress’s latest attempt to resolve its leadership crisis.
“Today I have come here to collect my nomination form (for Congress president elections) and will file it tomorrow,” the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, who was with Rahul Gandhi for the past few days on the party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, said after arriving in Delhi.
The nomination process for the election will continue till September 30 and the outcome will be declared on October 19.
The names of several other leaders such as Mallikarjun Kharge, AK Antony, Kamal Nath, Ambika Soni, and Pawan Kumar Bansal have been tossed around as possible contenders, though most of them ruled themselves out of the race.
So are there any more surprises in the offing? Former Jharkhand minister KN Tripathi collected the nomination forms on Thursday. And one shouldn’t forget that Pawan Kumar Bansal too took the forms, but “for someone else”.
But the two key contenders that officially remain in the race, for now, appear to be Shashi Tharoor and Digvijaya Singh.
Tharoor tweeted a picture on Thursday in which the two leaders can be seen hugging each other and posted that it is “not a battle between rivals but a friendly contest among colleagues”. He stressed that the common goal is to make the Congress win.
Singh retweeted the post, underscoring that their battle is against “communal forces” and that they both believe in the “Gandhian-Nehruvian ideology”. He also wished Tharoor the best for the upcoming contest.
While Digvijaya Singh is known to be a loyalist of the Gandhi family, Tharoor was among the so-called G-23 group of dissenters who had written a letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi in 2020, seeking reforms in the party.
Both the leaders are likely to file their nomination papers for the election on Friday.
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