All these records in the physical form are now part of the Dr Manmohan Singh Research Centre and Library, inaugurated on September 26 by Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi at the party headquarters, Indira Bhavan, in New Delhi.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: From records of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) sessions to party manifestos from the 1952 Lok Sabha election, copies of the now-defunct ‘Socialist India’ weekly and speeches of party presidents, the Congress is all set to digitise a slice of its recorded history and make it easily accessible for its workers and the public.
All these records, which also include Congress reports on every Lok Sabha election outcome, in the physical form, are now part of the Dr Manmohan Singh Research Centre and Library, inaugurated last Friday (September 26) by Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi at the new party headquarters, Indira Bhavan.
The party is also now looking for an experienced librarian and archivist who could manage the library, which at present has around 1,200 books with separate sections dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and P V Narasimha Rao, among others.
Congress general secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh, who donated a substantial number of books from his personal collection to the library, said it was party president Mallikarjun Kharge who first mooted the idea of having a library at Indira Bhavan, and it was Sonia Gandhi who suggested that it should be named after Singh.
While a big photograph of Manmohan Singh in the Finance Ministry Office on June 22, 1991, adorns one of the walls, a rare photograph of all the members of the Constituent Assembly, shared by M Ananthasayanam Iyengar's family, adorns the shelf that hosts a variety of books on the Constitution, including debates in the committees formed by the Constituent Assembly.
The party had a functional library when it was operating from 5-Rajendra Prasad Road, but after it shifted to 24 Akbar Road, the books were packed into an informal library, which some called a store room. The new library has books arranged on personality and themes, including environment, Emergency, culture, foreign affairs, caste, science, communalism and the Constitution, among others.
One of the sections in the library deals with Congress-related documents, including volumes of ‘The Encyclopedia of the Indian National Congress’, edited by party librarian Abdul Moin Zaidi and his wife Shahida Gufran Zaidi. It contains reports on party affairs since its formation in 1885 and includes minutes of the Congress Working Committee meetings. Another section has documentation of all the AICC sessions between 1885 and 1993.
The library also has bound volumes of the now-defunct ‘Socialist India’, a weekly published by the Congress between May 30, 1970, and February 26, 1977. It also has reports like ‘Recommendations of The Streamline Committee’, which was set up after the party split in 1969.
“Rahul Gandhi has suggested digitisation of these records. We will soon be starting the work,” Ramesh said.
Books of 'party detractors'
Interestingly, the library is not designed on partisan lines and has even books of what some call party detractors. A book on Abu Abraham’s cartoons on the Emergency, ‘The Games of Emergency’, Rao’s auto-biographical fiction ‘Insider’, biographies on leaders such as A B Vajpayee, H D Deve Gowda, Mamata Banerjee and speeches of CPI’s D Raja are among the list.
Books of party leaders Mani Shankar Aiyar, Salman Khurshid, Manish Tewari, P Chidambaram and Shashi Tharoor, among others, are also on the shelves.