Congress will have a new president, who will be a non-Gandhi for the first time in 24 years, by Wednesday evening with the party all set to count the votes for the presidential polls.
Veteran leader Mallikarjun Kharge is the favourite to win the contest against three-time MP and former Minister Shashi Tharoor.
All arrangements for the counting of votes have been made by the party’s Central Election Authority headed by Madhusudan Mistry. Ballot boxes from the states have reached the Congress headquarters and are kept at the strong room.
On Wednesday morning, the sealed boxes will be opened in the presence of election agents of both the candidates. All the votes will be mixed and then the counting will start.
The result is expected by evening. A total of 9,497 out of 9,915 delegates have cast their votes in Delhi and state headquarters. A special polling booth was set up in the Bharat Jodo Yatra camp in Karnataka’s to enable voters, including Rahul Gandhi, participating in the yatra to cast their votes.
Among the voters were Congress president Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress General Secretaries K C Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh and senior MPs like P Chidambaram. Kharge voted in Bengaluru while Tharoor voted in Thiruvananthapuram.
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