New Delhi, March 26: The Congress feared losing its Ghar but Rekha came to its rescue by giving her Ijaazat.

When the Rajya Sabha house committee allotted 15 Gurdwara Rakabganj Road in Lutyens Delhi to the actress-turned-MP last week, the Congress was worried.

The party had been using the bungalow for a decade as a war room where its brains trusts chalked out electoral strategies, from Lok Sabha elections to last year's Bihar polls. Currently, it houses the office of the Congress's new adviser, Prashant Kishor.

"We approached Rekhaji and she agreed to allow the party to continue to use it," Ananda Bhaskar Rapolu, Congress Rajya Sabha member from Telangana, told The Telegraph.

Rekha, nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2012, has not shown much keenness on attending Parliament. On the rare occasions she is summoned by the Congress to Delhi during House sessions, she checks into a suite at the Taj Mansingh Hotel, party sources said.

All of Rekha's phones, their numbers accessed from Rajya Sabha records, were switched off today.

The Congress had had free run of the bungalow since it was allotted to Shobhana Bhartia, another presidential nominee to the upper House, in 2006. Bhartia, who has private accommodation in Delhi, never lived in the bungalow.

After her term expired, the house went to Rapolu in April 2012 but he continued to stay at his previous allotment, "a small flat in Meena Bagh", leaving the bungalow for use by the Congress.

"This was my service to the party," Rapolu told this newspaper, "but I was informed a few days ago that the house had been allotted to Rekha."

He accused the BJP of conjuring up "some constraints" to withdraw the bungalow from him and "deny the Congress the house".

"There was a concern whether Rekhaji would let the party retain the bungalow," Rapolu said, "but I was hopeful because she had been nominated during the UPA's tenure."

Rekha's six-year term ends in 2018, so the Congress can continue to use the premises without any hassles for the next two years.

"It's good news that Rekhaji has agreed to allow us the use of the house. The BJP has been trying to create roadblocks for sometime now," Congress MP Pramod Tiwari, a member of the Rajya Sabha house committee, told this newspaper.

Rekha had initially been offered a flat in an MPs' apartment complex, the Brahmaputra Apartments in Bishamber Dayal Marg in central Delhi. She cited lack of privacy to reject the flat.

She was then allotted a bungalow in Balwant Rai Mehta Marg, just 500 metres from Delhi's cultural hub, Mandi House, which is home to the headquarters of the Lalit Kala Akademi, Sahitya Akademi and some other cultural organisations.

But the then occupant, BJP member Ramdas Agarwal, had a few months of his Rajya Sabha term left and declined to vacate the house. It took nearly four more years for 15 Gurdwara Rakabganj Road to be allotted to the actress, thanks to a shortage of bungalows caused by politicians and officials continuing to occupy them beyond their tenure.

Rapolu was told last week that he was no longer entitled to the house and needed to vacate it.

"I am a senior MP, and they cannot just say that I am not eligible to stay there," he fumed, but accepted the inevitable.

A senior BJP source, privy to the workings of the Rajya Sabha house committee, said that presidential nominees like Rekha and former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar are eligible for bungalows but first-time MPs like Rapolu are not.

"Besides, Rapolu himself acknowledges that he has been staying at Meena Bagh from day one. The committee has been asking all the MPs with multiple government quarters to vacate all but one of them," the source said.

The Congress had been particularly worried about losing its war room because, with several of its Rajya Sabha members due to retire this year, its pool of bungalows is set to get depleted anyway.

For now, though, Rekha seems to have saved the day for the party.