Congress session in Karnataka's Belagavi begins tomorrow: How is the event linked to Mahatma Gandhi

The meeting of around 200 leaders has been christened the Nav Satyagraha Baithak'.

The Congress Working Committee (CWC) will hold a two-day programme on December 26 and 27 in Belagavi, Karnataka, to mark the centenary celebrations of the 1924 Indian National Congress session presided over by Mahatma Gandhi. It was the only Congress session presided over by Mahatma Gandhi.

The meeting of around 200 leaders has been christened the “Nav Satyagraha Baithak”. It will be followed by a “Jai Bapu, Jai Bhim, Jai Samvidhan” rally on Friday. The two-day session will also see the attendance of the Congress brass including party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra along with CWC members and senior party leaders from across the country, including its chief ministers and state unit presidents.

"We are organising a historic conference on December 26 and 27 in Belagavi remembering the hundredth anniversary of the congress session presided over by Mahatma Gandhi. The Belagavi session of the Indian National Congress was a historic one in our Indian political history," said AICC general secretary K C Venugopal.

Venugopal said the party will analyse the current political situation, and the BJP government's laws endorsing their ideology, and discuss what Congress' ideology stands for. He said the Congress had strongly taken up the issue of the "insult" of Ambedkar by Home Minister Amit Shah and had been demanding the sacking of Shah as well as an apology from him.

Gandhi had held the post of the Congress president between December 1924 and April 1925. After his release from prison in February 1924 following a surgery, Gandhi was reprotedly unhappy over the lack of unity between Hindus and Muslims during the freedom struggle. He went on a 21-day fast from September 18 to October 8 that year to “bridge” this divide. He also wanted to address the issue of rampant factionalism in the Congress.

In this session, Gandhi underlined his ideas of non-violence.

“At the Special Session of the Congress at Calcutta in 1920, the boycott of Government titles, law-courts, educational institutions, legislative bodies and foreign cloth was resolved upon. All the boycotts were more or less taken up by the parties concerned… Though not a single boycott was anywhere near completion, every one of them had undoubtedly the effect of diminishing the prestige of the particular institution boycotted. The most important boycott was the boycott of violence….” Gandhi said as quoted by Indian Express.

On Hindu-Muslim unity and fighting untouchability, Gandhi said untouchability was another hindrance to swaraj. “Its removal is just as essential for Swaraj as the attainment of Hindu-Muslim unity. This is an essentially Hindu question and Hindus cannot claim or take swaraj till they have restored the liberty of the suppressed classes,” he had said in his address.

The session was attended by several senior Congress leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Sarojini Naidu, and Khilafat movement leaders Muhammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali, among others.