After Delhi High Court order, Centre allots new office space to AAP

New Delhi, July 25

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been allocated a new office in Lutyens Delhi following directives from the Delhi High Court, according to party sources on Thursday.

The new office will be located at Bungalow No. 1, Ravi Shankar Shukla Lane, New Delhi.

The AAP’s new office was earlier occupied by the Nationalist Congress Party, which vacated it after losing its national party status.

Interestingly, this will be the fifth address of the AAP’s headquarters. In the initial days of its inception, the party was operating from Ghaziabad and later moved to a bungalow near Hanuman Mandir. From that office, the party shifted its base to Patel Nagar and then to 206, Rouse Avenue.

Sources said the party would take a few days to shift to its new office space.

Commenting on the development, senior AAP leader and Delhi Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj said, “Since 2014, we are qualified to get an office here on account of being a state party but the Centre did not give us office space. We were allotted an office but attempts were made to take it away and destroy our party and bring us on the road. We are entitled to an office since we are a national party. But it is very unfortunate that due to politics they did not give us office. We had to go to court to get office space. It is a common courtesy in politics that you allot an office to a party.”

Last year, the AAP was granted the status of a national party by the Election Commission.

Bharadwaj welcomed the court’s intervention, which compelled the Centre to allocate the office, but expressed regret that it had to come to that.

He said with AAP’s recent elevation to national party status, it now qualifies for two offices. He also alleged that the Centre had previously neither allotted land nor provided an office to the party.

The High Court granted the Centre time till Thursday to decide on the allocation of an office space to AAP, in recognition of its status as a national party.