Highs and lows of Congress that 24 Akbar Road has seen

STILL smarting from its shock defeats in the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly elections, the Congress is set to have a new address in the Capital in the new year.

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The inauguration of the new office of the grand old party had been delayed partly because the building was yet to get a ‘no-objection certificate’ from the Delhi municipal authorities. The other reason was more compelling. The party, facing an existential crisis, needed a ‘favourable celestial alignment’, which would apparently be in place on January 14, the auspicious occasion of Makar Sankranti.

A plaque would be installed by party President Mallikarjun Kharge, one of the few Congress chiefs who is not from the Nehru-Gandhi family. The absence of a plaque at the present office — 24 Akbar Road — was the result of confusion among party members on the first day of January 1978. Nobody, including Indira Gandhi, had bothered about the stars and their influence on her politics.

For the past nearly 46 years, 24 Akbar Road has served as the headquarters of the Indian National Congress. The new office address is Indira Bhawan on Deendayal Upadhyaya Marg, where the BJP already has an impressive headquarters.

However, the Congress, wary of having an office on a road named after RSS ideologue Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, apparently wants to use its back door as the main entrance, which is located on Feroz Shah Kotla Marg.

With the Congress set to complete 140 years of its foundation on December 28 this year, here is a recap of how the party under Indira occupied 24 Akbar Road. It has witnessed many highs and lows since then.

It was a chilly winter morning in January 1978 when Shoban Singh and 20 other karamcharis (workers) of the breakaway Congress faction headed by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi entered 24 Akbar Road.

A Type VII bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, 24 Akbar Road belonged to G Venkatswamy, a Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh. Venkatswamy had chosen to side with Indira when most party leaders had stayed away, fearing that proximity to her would invite retaliation from the then ruling Janata Party.

It was a testing time for Indira and her party. She was herself ‘homeless’. Her Mehrauli farmhouse was half-built and she was losing friends fast. Even such trusted friends as Teji Bachchan (megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s mother) had begun complaining that the government-run censor board was troubling her son and filmmaker Manmohan Desai, who had made several blockbusters starring Amitabh.

Family loyalist Muhammad Yunus offered his residence, 12 Wellington Crescent, for Indira and her family as their private residence, while he moved to private quarters in South Delhi.

Incidentally, this was not 24 Akbar Road’s first brush with history. For two years beginning 1961, it played host to Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi was barely 15 when she arrived there with her mother Daw Khin Kyi, who had been appointed Myanmar’s ambassador to India.

24 Akbar Road was named Burma House by Jawaharlal Nehru in recognition of Daw Khin Kyi’s special status. The house, built by Sir Edwin Lutyens between 1911 and 1925, was regarded as a singularly fine example of British colonial architecture and a masterpiece of early Modernism.

After the 1969 party split, Indira’s breakaway Congress faction emerged as the ‘real Congress’ and she had no regrets about splitting the party over her choice of presidential nominee VV Giri against the old guard’s choice Neelam Sanjiva Reddy.

The Congress split of 1969 was significant on many counts. It led to Indira’s Congress losing control over 7 Jantar Mantar Road, where the party office had been housed since Independence. It moved first to 5 Rajendra Prasad Road in 1971 and then to 24 Akbar Road in 1978.

The bitter split of 1978 had left the Indira Congress with absolutely nothing. The then office secretary, Sadiq Ali, had declined to hand over any official records, papers or books to Indira. So, the party no longer had any files, records, correspondence, stationery, flags or typewriters. Indira was greatly pained to lose her party’s invaluable archives.

But when she returned to power with a thumping majority in 1980, like a true believer in destiny, she refused to stake claim on the old party office. “I have built the party from scratch, not once, but twice. The new office premises will rejuvenate the party rank and file for decades,” she told Sanjay, when her politician son broached the subject of returning to the old office.

Indira’s words proved prophetic. 24 Akbar Road provided a new lease of life to the Congress. Like emperor Akbar, 24 Akbar Road struggled in its nascent stages, but managed to stand on its feet in such a manner that it provided strength and stability for decades to come.

In 2009, when the Congress was heading the UPA government at the Centre, none of the AICC general secretaries occupying the big rooms at 24 Akbar Road, except Rahul Gandhi, had won a parliamentary election. For decades, 24 Akbar Road has contributed little in terms of generating new ideas for the party’s agenda. These ‘non-accountable’ leaders often lacked the ideological clarity that the Congress was so proud of, and they were unable to come up with out-of-the-box ideas. These functionaries were only keen to kill or blunt any fresh initiative rather than help the party make collective use of the talent at its disposal.

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and Congress President Kharge face the daunting task of reversing the party’s fortunes. Will the grand old party — which launched the nationwide ‘Jai Bapu, Jai Bhim, Jai Samvidhan Abhiyan’ on Friday — find its feet at its new office or wilt under the might of the BJP? We will know the answer in due course.