By IANS,
New Delhi : The Congress is to commemorate its 125th anniversary next year on a grand scale and on Friday set up a 19-member organising committee headed by party chief Sonia Gandhi to celebrate the event.
The Congress, founded by A.O. Hume in 1885, will complete 125 years in December 2010, but the celebrations will begin a year earlier.
The year-long celebrations, which begin Dec 28, 2009, will seek to highlight the role of the Indian National Congress in the independence struggle and its contribution to nation building.
All India Congress Committee secretary Tom Vaddakan said that exhibitions, seminars and film shows would be organised across all the party block units.
“It will rekindle the pan-India aura of the party,” he said, adding that the detailed programme would worked out by the committee.
Besides the Congress president, other members of the organising committee include union ministers Pranab Mukherjee, Ambika Soni, Mukul Wasnik, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Murli Deora, Anand Sharma, Jairam Ramesh and party general secretaries Rahul Gandhi, Mohsina Kidwai, Janardan Dwivedi, B.K. Hariprasad, Digvijay Singh.
It also includes AICC treasurer Motilal Vora, political secretary to the Congress president Ahmed Patel, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, party spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan and former minister Mani Shankar Aiyar. Defence Minister A.K. Antony is the vice-chairman of the committee.
The celebrations come at a time when the graph of the Congress has improved following its successes in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and in last month’s assembly polls in Arunachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and Haryana.
The party had faced a string of assembly poll reverses before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Its political journey over the past two decades has been uneven with the party conceding political space in some crucial states to regional and opposition parties.
The Congress has been heading a coalition government at the centre since 2004 and has a desire to regain its status as the pre-eminent political force of the country.