 "Swaraj Bhawan: The hub of Congress politics")
According to Uttar Pradesh (UP) Congress spokesperson, Kishor Varshney, party chief Sonia Gandhi will dedicate the room in Swaraj Bhavan to the nation, where former prime minister Indira Gandhi was born on November 19, 1917. Exactly what a dedication to the nation entails, is not known.
The room lies next to a suite, which the Gandhi family members use when they stay at Swaraj Bhavan. Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi stayed at the suite on September 14, when he spent the night at Swaraj Bhavan as part of his kisan yatra. On September 15, he criss-crossed parts of Allahabad.
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Kishor added Indira Gandhi's birth anniversary will also mark the formal launch of the grand old party's campaign for the UP Assembly polls next year.
Sources said Swaraj Bhavan is likely to become the campaign headquarters for the high-stakes UP polls as the Congress seeks to invoke the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
Though Nehru was not born at Swaraj Bhavan, he lived there and was groomed as a lawyer by his father Motilal Nehru.
Rahul and his sister Priyanka Vadra will also be present on the occasion as the Congress plans to take Indira Gandhi's birth centenary celebrations all over the country. The Bharatiya Janata Party is waiting for the real estate offering to hit the political market - it hopes it can make capital out of the theme of the one-family-led Congress party in the forthcoming Assembly election.
Three-term former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, the chief ministerial nominee for the UP polls, heads a panel which will oversee the implementation of Indira Gandhi's birth centenary celebrations.
Party veterans have fond memories of the house. "Swaraj Bhavan used to be the Congress headquarters during independence movement. The Congress Working Committee used to meet there. Mahatma Gandhi used to stay there," Anil Shastri, son of former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, told Business Standard.
In 1900, Jawaharlal Nehru's father bought the palatial estate at 1, Church Road, from Kanwar Parmananda of Moradabad for Rs 19,000. Before that, well-known educationist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who later founded the Aligarh Muslim University, owned the house and had named it Ishrat Manzil.
Motilal renovated the sprawling property over a decade on the lines of a British country estate and furnished it with household articles bought during his several trips to Europe. He named the house Anand Bhavan, the abode of happiness.
In 1930, Motilal donated the original mansion to the Indian National Congress, which was spearheading the freedom movement and renamed it Swaraj Bhavan. He built another house adjacent to the original mansion and named it Anand Bhavan.
Gradually, Swaraj Bhavan became the hub of national politics, where Congress stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and Subash Chandra Bose hotly debated ways to free the country from the British.
In 1970, then prime minister Indira Gandhi donated Anand Bhavan to the nation. The building now houses a museum and the Jawahar Planetarium. Swaraj Bhavan is managed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund.