Disgruntled Congress leaders plan to move court on organisational elections

New Delhi: Several disgruntled Congress leaders are planning to move the court to highlight the alleged irregularities in holding the organisational elections.

A large number of them have already raised a banner of revolt for excluding their names from the list of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) delegates. The inclusion of some non-elected delegates had also angered central election authority (CEA) chairperson Madhusudan Mistry who refused to sign the lists and these were instead signed by general secretary in-charge of organisation K C Venugopal, a move dubbed as a clear deviation from the past and in violation of the prescribed rules.

Mistry, whom former Congress president Rahul Gandhi had described as TN Seshan of the Congress, had taken exception to Venugopal's move to sign the lists.

The intervention of new Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge ensured that the Assistant Pradesh Returning Officers (APROs) were included in the lists as co-opted delegates.

Two senior Congress leaders from Bihar Kishore Kumar Jha and Dr Sunil Kumar had sought former party chief Sonia Gandhi's intervention on the matter.

In his letter to Sonia Gandhi, Sunil Kumar wrote how his name was deleted from the list of AICC delegates just on the eve of the elections to the Congress president's post in October last year.

"Even the list of the proposers were changed just before the elections on October 17. Instead of him and Satyendra Kumar, two other persons were included in the list. We lodged a complaint with Mistry ji on October 22," added Sunil Kumar.

Citing examples, he said the names of Kharge's proposers were changed at the last minute. "For example in one set of nomination papers, the delegate number of senior leader Tariq Anwar is 513 but in the voting list his delegate number is 514," Sunil Kumar wrote.

Sources said such irregularities have been reported from elsewhere too and this has prompted many to explore the legal options.