Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said that his family will not control the new party chief and that the two contenders for the post – Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor – have good stature.

“I do not think either of them is going to be remote-controlled and frankly the tone is insulting to them,” Gandhi said while replying to a question by a reporter during the press conference at Turuvekere in Karnataka.

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.

Several Congress leaders have backed Kharge’s candidature. Bhupinder Hooda, Anand Sharma, Manish Tewari and Prithviraj Chavan from the group of 23, who had written to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 seeking large-scale organisational reforms, have also supported Kharge.

Kharge on October 2 claimed that he had told Tharoor that there should be a consensus candidate.

Meanwhile, most senior party leaders skipped Tharoor’s Tamil Nadu event on October 7.

On Saturday, Gandhi, who is on the Karnataka leg of his Bharat Jodo Yatra, said that he did not have any opinion about the election.

The reporters also asked him about the Popular Front of India, which the government banned for five years on September 28 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Gandhi said that it does not matter who the person spreading hatred is and from which community they come. He added that violence is anti-national.

Among other things, Gandhi also said that the party is opposing the New Education Policy as it is distorting Indian history and traditions. “We want a decentralised education system,” he added.