By IANS,
New Delhi : Delhi will play host to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) plenary session for the first time in 32 years. While it will be the 83rd session in the 125-year-old history of the party, it is the sixth to be held in the national capital.
The Dec 18-20 plenary, to be held at a specially set-up venue in Burari in northwest Delhi, will mark the completion of the year-long celebrations of the party’s 125th anniversary.
The last time the party held the plenary in Delhi was in 1978 with Indira Gandhi, then in the opposition, presiding over the 76th AICC session.
Held during the Janata Party rule, the meet saw another split in the Congress with Gandhi forming a new party – Congress-I. The Indira Gandhi faction claimed it was the real Congress and won the 1980 Lok Sabha polls. Later, the Congress-I was recognised as the Indian National Congress.
Before that, the Congress plenary was last held in Delhi in 1951 with then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru presiding over it.
Delhi had before that hosted the Congress session in 1932, where Madan Mohan Malviya was elected president. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad presided over another session in New Delhi in 1923.
The first time New Delhi hosted a Congress plenary session was in 1918, seven years after the capital of British India was shifted to Delhi from Kolkata (then Calcutta). Malviya was Congress president then too.
The party’s last plenary session – the 82nd – was held in Hyderabad in 2006. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, was the main organiser of the grand meet held after the return of the Congress at the centre and the state.