All India Congress Committee

• 1. Introduction

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  The All India Congress Committee sits at the very heart of one of the world's oldest political parties. It is the presidium, the central assembly where the Indian National Congress makes its most consequential decisions. With up to a thousand members drawn from across a vast and diverse country, it is a body designed to represent every corner of India. Yet how did such an institution come to exist, and what does it actually do? The answers reach back more than a century, to a time before India was independent, when a loosely organised national movement needed to become something more structured and more powerful.

• 2. A Movement Finds Its Form

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  The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, but for decades it functioned through annual gatherings rather than any permanent central machinery. There was no standing body to coordinate action between sessions, no institutional spine to hold the provincial units together. That changed in 1920 at the Nagpur Session, where a new constitution was adopted to transform the Congress into a mass-based organisation. The Nagpur Session introduced a system of elected representatives drawn from Provincial Congress Committees, and through that structural change the AICC took on its modern institutional shape. Before independence, the AICC served mainly as the coordinating link between the Congress leadership and those provincial units. It framed and approved organisational resolutions, maintained communication across regions, and ensured that decisions made at the top actually reached the districts below. Its early administrative home was Swaraj Bhavan in Allahabad, a building that became a nerve centre for the national movement.

• 3. Independence and Transformation

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  When India became independent in 1947, the AICC did not simply carry on as before. A movement that had been fighting for self-rule now had to become something different: the governing apparatus of a parliamentary democracy. The organisation assumed greater responsibility for managing party affairs across a newly sovereign country, coordinating with state units and supporting the functioning of the Congress within parliament. The physical headquarters moved as well, leaving Allahabad behind and relocating to 7, Jantar Mantar Marg, near the famous astronomical landmark in Delhi. After the 1969 Congress split, under Indira Gandhi, the headquarters shifted again to 24 Akbar Road, just behind 10 Janpath. The institutional records of those formative decades are now held in the Archives at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Teen Murti House in Delhi, preserving the correspondence and resolutions of a body that helped shape a nation.

• 4. How the Committee Works

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  Mallikarjun Kharge currently serves as the Congress President, holding the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. The President is elected by the full AICC membership, and from that position also appoints the several General Secretaries who run the organisation on a day-to-day basis. The AICC itself is composed of delegates sent by the various state-level Pradesh Congress Committees, who have in turn been elected or nominated from district and panchayat-level party units. Those delegates do not only elect the President: they also elect the Congress Working Committee, which stands as the apex decision-making body of the party. General Secretaries carry designated responsibility for specific states; for instance, K.C. Venugopal holds the organisation portfolio, while Jairam Ramesh oversees communications, publicity, and digital media. The Treasurer's role falls to Ajay Maken, a sitting member of the Rajya Sabha and former Union Minister.

• 5. A Network of Departments

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  Below the General Secretaries sits a wide network of specialised departments and cells covering nearly every segment of Indian society. There is an All India Professionals Congress, an All India Adivasi Congress, an All India Fisherman Congress, and an All India Kisan Congress dedicated to farmers. A separate department handles unorganised workers and employees. Salman Khurshid leads the Foreign Affairs Department, while Abhishek Singhvi heads the Law, Human Rights, and RTI Department. The Research Department is led by Rajeev Gowda, and social media and digital platforms fall under Supriya Shrinate, who previously served as a senior executive with The Times Group. One of the more historically resonant units is the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayati Raj Sangathan, chaired by Sunil Panwar, which carries the name of the former Prime Minister and focuses on grassroots local governance. Its structure of General Secretaries, National Coordinators, and a training team reaches down to the village level, reflecting the AICC's constitutional commitment to building a party from the ground up rather than only from the top down.