Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor received the nomination forms for the party presidential election on Saturday as the week-long window for filing of the papers opened, reported PTI.
The Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram officially confirmed that he is set to contest the poll after his aide Aalim Javeri collected the forms from Madhusudan Mistry, the chairperson of the Congress Central Election Authority.
Tharoor will be competing for the post of the party president against Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.
On Friday, Gehlot confirmed that he will contest the election while announcing that Congress MP Rahul Gandhi has made it clear that no one from the Gandhi family should become the next party chief.
The final list of candidates will be published at 5 pm on October 8.
The election to decide the successor to the longest-serving party president Sonia Gandhi will take place on October 17 and the results will be announced two days later. Sonia Gandhi has been at the helm since 1998, except the two years between 2017 and 2019 when Rahul Gandhi took over.
The last time the Congress saw any non-Gandhi in the contest for being a party chief was in 2000, when Jitendra Prasada had lost to Sonia Gandhi.
More than 9,000 Pradesh Congress Committee delegates will vote in the poll.
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