Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor on Monday will finally contest against each other for the prized position of AICC chief. The grand-old party will see a non-Gandhi to the position in over 24 years.

Over 9,000 Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates will vote in the AICC chief elections, with the results on Wednesday.

Voting will be held at the AICC headquarters in Delhi and at over 65 polling booths across the country between 10 AM-4 PM. Congress’ central election authority chairman Madhusudan Mistry said on Wednesday that the elections will be held by a secret ballot and who voted for whom will not be known.

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Mistry had said the sealed boxes would be transported to Delhi, and kept in a strong room at the AICC headquarters, and opened in Delhi. The ballot papers would be mixed before counting starts.

While party chief Sonia Gandhi and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are expected to vote in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi will be voting at the Bharat Jodo Yatra campsite in Karnataka’s Sanganakallu in Ballari along with around 40 other Bharat Yatris who are PCC delegates. The Gandhis have maintained that they will be neutral and have no “official candidate”.

Kharge, is seen as a clear favourite, as his candidature has received support from party heavy-weights and senior leaders, even as the Thiruvananthapuram MP has pitched himself as a candidate of change.

The 80-year-old Dalit leader from Karnataka, Kharge has said he did not have any separate poll manifesto and that implementing the Udaipur declaration, adopted by the party at the Chintan Shivir held in Rajasthan earlier this year, was his only agenda.

Although Mistry has asserted that a level-playing field had been ensured for both candidates, however, Tharoor camp has flagged several violations of directives for the party’s central authority, which included, office bearers campaigning for a candidate, with the latest being Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot expressing his support to Kharge.

The last electoral contest for the top post of the party took place in 2000 when Jitendra Prasada lost to Sonia Gandhi. This is the sixth time elections are taking place in the party’s 137-year-old history. Rahul Gandhi who was the Congress President from 2017-2019 had quit the post accepting moral responsibility after the party’s crushing defeat in 2019 Lok Sabha elections losing to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Sonia Gandhi, who is the longest-serving president of the party, served from 1998-2019. Following her son Rahul Gandhi’s resignation, Sonia Gandhi became the interim president and still holds the position.

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The party has been criticised as being a Nehru-Gandhi family fiefdom. In its 137 years of existence, six members of the family — Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have led the party.

To counter this criticism, Rahul Gandhi had said that the party must have a non-Congress chief to the top post.

(With inputs from PTI)