Hyderabad, Mar 27: Senior Left leader A B Bardhan was on Thursday re-elected as the General Secretary of the CPI for the fourth consecutive term. The election of the octogenarian communist veteran to the post came on the concluding day of the four-day 20th National Congress here.

S Sudhakar Reddy, MP from Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh, was elected the Deputy General Secretary of the party, a post that has been revived after a gap of nine years. Announcing the decisions of the party congress, Bardhan said a new national council has been elected with 125 full members and 13 candidate members. Besides, the Council has 30 fresh faces.

The new council met and elected a 31-member national executive in which five are new members - Aziz Pasha, C Divakaran, N A Raja, Pallab Sengupta and Dr Kango, he said. The party congress also elected a nine-member secretariat comprising Bardhan, Sudhakar Reddy, D Raja, Gurdas Dasgupta, Nandagopal Bhattacharya, C K Chandrappan, Shameem Faizi, Atul Kumar Anjan and Amarjeet Kaur, who is the lone woman member in the secretariat.

The Communist Party of India elected a nine-member central control commission headed by R Nalla Kannu (Tamil Nadu) who will be the ex-officio member of the national executive. The other members are M S Dawood (Tamil Nadu), Ajay Chakraborthi (Centre), E Nageswara Rao (Andhra Pradesh), Prem Pavani (AP), Kula Das (Assam), C A Kurian (Keral), Sivdas Utane (Maharashtra) and M Sakhi Devi (Manipur). As a culmination of the four-day deliberations, the party is organising a massive rally and public meeting at Nizam College Grounds here later on Thursday evening.