Three times a Congress leader gave up CM seat for party president post

NEW DELHI: With Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra deciding not to run in next month's Congress president election, the party seems set to announce its first non-Gandhi chief for the first time in nearly 25 years.

The last time the party had a non-Gandhi president was in 1997 when Sitaram Kesri defeated Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot. Sonia Gandhi took over in 1998 and has been heading the party ever since. Rahul Gandhi briefly served as party chief between 2017 and 2019.

In fact, Sonia Gandhi is the longest-serving president of the INC since it was formed by British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume in 1885.


Out of the 75 years since Independence, a member of the Gandhi family has been at the party's helm for about 40 years.

Since 1947, the party has been led by 16 people out of which five have been from the Gandhi family.
The latest election will take place on October 17 and the new party president will be announced on October 19.

Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot was widely seen as the favoured candidate of the Gandhi family. The latest political drama in Jaipur, however, has thrown the party into a tizzy.

The only other Congress leader officially in the running at the moment is Shashi Tharoor. Senior leaders Kamal Nath, Pawan Kumar Bansal, and Ambika Soni have so far said they are not interested in heading the party. The window to file nominations for the Congress president poll closes on September 30.

Precedent for giving up CM post for party chief seat
There is precedence for a Congress leader giving up his chief ministership to take over as the party president.

In 1968, then Karnataka CM S Nijalingappa (1968-69) gave up his post to become the party president. It was a decision he repented till the end.

In his autobiography, My Life and Politics, Nijalingappa said: "For many reasons, I still repent that decision. It would have been better from all points of view if I had continued as chief minister of Mysore and not accepted this onerous responsibility."

But unlike Gehlot, Nijalingappa was given the option to pick his successor.

In November 1954, Saurashtra CM UN Dhebar (1955-59) was moved to Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru -- although it was known then that the state would be merged with Bombay, which it did in November 1956.

K Kamaraj (1964-67) gave up his chief ministership of Tamil Nadu voluntarily in October 1963 to nationally reinvigorate the Congress as its president. Interestingly, after the 1962 Tamil Nadu assembly election that Kamaraj won for the Congress, and after he handed over the CM's chair in 1963 to M Bhaktavatsalam, the party never formed a government in the state.

The only Congress president who continued to hold the chief minister’s post was Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy (1960-63).