A total of 68 delegates from the Meghalaya Congress will be among the 9300 across the country who will cast their vote tomorrow to elect the new president of the party.
66-year-old Tharoor is pitted against 80-year-old Mallikarjun Kharge in the party’s presidential election.
Tharoor who was scheduled to visit Shillong yesterday to garner support from the Meghalaya delegates cancelled his visit at the last minute.
According to State Congress general secretary Sanjay Das, Tharoor cancelled the visit to Shillong “due to some technical issues in his aircraft.”
As per the tour itinerary, Tharoor was scheduled to arrive at Umroi Airport at 1:30 pm and later interact with Congress representatives at the Congress Bhawan in Shillong.
60 of the party delegates from Meghalaya were nominated by the MPCC while eight others were nominated by the AICC. The Meghalaya delegates will cast their votes at the party office here.
Meanwhile, QR code-based identity cards were issued by the Central Election Authority (CEA) of the Congress to delegates across 29 states and nine union territories to take part in the election.
The polling will take place between 10 am to 4 pm. The vote will be by the secret ballot.
All the ballot boxes will be brought to the AICC headquarters in New Delhi. On October 19 the counting of votes will start and the result will be declared as soon as the counting gets over.
Ahead of the counting of votes, all the ballot papers will be mixed so that no one would know how many votes the candidate got from a particular state.
Incidentally, this is the first time in 25 years when there is no Gandhi family member in the fray for the Congress presidential polls. The election is also being held after a gap of around 22 years.
