Tharoor vs Kharge: How the day of nominations unfolded with a ‘manifesto’ row

Congress leader Madhusudan Mistry said that the Gandhi family has not “endorsed anyone” in the party's upcoming presidential elections.

After many speculations on who will be filing the nomination forms for Congress presidential elections due in October, two of the most prominent faces of the grand old party emerged on Friday - Shashi Tharoor and Mallikarjun Kharge. A third person, Jharkhand Congress leader KN Tripathi, is also in the fray. The nomination forms will now be scrutinised and the final list of candidates will be announced Friday evening, Madhusudan Mistry, who is overseeing the polls, said earlier in the day at a press conference.

Congress veteran Mallikarjun Kharge and party's Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor.

All the three candidates filed their nominations earlier today, and Tharoor and Kharge later addressed a press briefing too. However, the nature of the address was different for both leaders. Tharoor, the Congress party's MP from Kerala's capital Thiruvananthapuram, told reporters after filing the nomination papers that he welcomes Kharge's entry in the race to claim the top job. On the other hand, Kharge - Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, refused to speak on Tharoor's candidature, and simply thanked his party leaders for showing him support ahead of the elections.

Mistry, meanwhile, quashed reports of the Gandhi family backing any candidate saying they have not “endorsed anyone”.

Here the key developments in the big story that unfolded throughout the day:

1. Tharoor, as per his earlier intimation, filed his nomination in the noon, and later took to Twitter to thank Congress interim boss Sonia Gandhi for her “guidance and vision”.
2. On Kharge's nomination, the Thiruvanthapuram MP said that more candidates are needed for the party's “benefit”, adding that the former is the “Bhishma Pitamah of the Congress”. Tharoor added that Gandhi had assured the party has no official candidate and the family will stay neutral in the race. “In that spirit, I put forward my candidacy. It's not to disrespect anyone, a friendly contest,” he said.
3. Kharge said that he has been connected with the ideology of Congress since his childhood when he used campaign for them as a school boy while in Classes 8 and 9. He added that he was fighting the presidential elections to bring about a “big change” in the grand old party.
4. As many as 30 leaders, including several in the rebel G-23 camp, have proposed for the candidature of Kharge. This list includes Salman Khurshid, Digvijaya Singh, Bhupinder Hooda, Prithviraj Chavan, Manish Tewari, Anand Sharma and Ashok Gehlot, among others.
5. Congress veteran Digvijaya Singh, who only announced on Thursday, about his decision to contest the party's presidential polls, opted out of the race earlier in the day saying he cannot be an opponent of Kharge. His pull out came a day after Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot opted out following major drama in his state due to mass rebellion by MLAs. The lawmakers opposed the idea of Gehlot's rival and former deputy CM of Rajasthan Sachin Pilot taking over from the CM if he ran for the Congress party chief's post. Gehlot met Gandhi at her 10 Janpath residence in Delhi on Thursday, and “profusely” apologised to her for the rebellion before announcing he was not contesting the elections anymore.
6. Tharoor received massive backlash on social media, including from the BJP, after his office put out a manifesto that showed a distorted map of India. The image erroneously eliminated parts of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. BJP's IT-cell head Amit Malviya said that the “wannabe Congress president is hell bent dismembering India”.
7. The Thiruvananthapuram MP later “unconditionally” apologised for the error to his Twitter family of over eight million followers, and shared fresh links to his manifesto in both Hindi and English. Tharoor said a small of team volunteers made a mistake, and corrected it immediately. “No one does such things on purpose,” he tweeted.
8. At a press briefing in Karnataka where Congress' ongoing ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ entered on its 23rd day, party veteran and MP Jairam Ramesh called the forthcoming presidential elections a “sideshow”. He stressed that the grand old party's main focus is on the nationwide campaign, and whatever is happening with Congress, including the mass defections among MLAs in Goa and the Rajasthan crisis, are all part of “democratic politics”.
9. Addressing reporters on Friday, Mistry said that they have received a total of 20 nomination forms, of which 14 were from Kharge, five from Tharoor and one from Tripathi.
10. In a tweet, Tharoor wished his opponent Kharge the “best” for the Congress presidential elections. “We worked well together in the LokSabha and he was gracious as ever in wishing me luck,” the MP's tweet further read.