Mallikarjun Kharge was elected president of the Congress Party today, the first non-Gandhi to head the party in two decades.
A senior Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge is a long-time loyalist of the Gandhi family. He joined the Congress party in 1969. Kharge represented labour unions in his early career.
Belonging to the Dalit community, Kharge was born in 1942 in the Bidar district of the southern state. Kharge was a law student and from his early student life, he took an active interest in politics.
In 1972, the then Congress party chief in Karnataka, Devaraj Urs, convinced Kharge to contest from an upper-caste-dominated constituency, Gurmitkal.
He won that constituency nine times consecutively. Later, he contested and also won from Chitapur.
Kharges rise to national politics began after the 2009 general elections, where he contested and won the Gulbarga parliamentary seat to gain entry to the Lok Sabha for the first time. Kharge won for the second time in 2014.
He, however, lost to the BJP in 2019. In June 2014, Kharge was appointed Leader of the Congress party in the Lok Sabha. He was also the cabinet Minister of Railways and Minister of Labor and Employment at the Centre.
On June 12, 2022, the 78-year-old political stalwart was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Karnataka. He was appointed Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha, a post that he resigned from on October 1, 2022 to contest the presidential election of Congress.
