A cheerful Congress president Sonia Gandhi was back in parliament on Tuesday on the opening day of the winter session, indicating that she has fully recovered from the undisclosed ailment that prevented her to miss the entire monsoon session.

She kept sitting in the Lok Sabha when the House was adjourned for 45 minutes due to pandemonium and accepted greetings from the party members approaching her front desk on the treasury benches.

Giving her company and occasionally chatting with her was Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, who too chose not to leave the House during the adjournment unlike a host of other ministers, who made a beeline to greet Sonia with folded hands and then withdrew from the House.

Missing from the House, however, was her son Rahul Gandhi, who has moved to Uttar Pradesh for campaign and would be away from Delhi for whole of the week.

Dressed in a bright blue saree, Sonia exchanged words with some of the MPs who approached her for expressing pleasure at her return to Parliament and telling her that they missed her badly in the last session. She maintained a low profile since after return from a surgery in August in the United States and hence the MPs were quite happy to see her back among them.

Birthday- It will be during this session that goes on till December 21 that she will turn 65. Her birthday falls on Friday, December 9. On Tuesday, it was the 72nd birthday of Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, who was greeted by many, including RJD chief Lalu Prasad, in the House.

Other prominent leaders whose birthdays fall during the session include Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who turns 76 on December 11, and Sharad Pawar who turns 71 on December 12. In fact, the birthday of five other MPs falls on December 12. They are Gopinath Munde and Syed Shahnawaz Hussain of BJP, P T Thomas of Congress, K Murugesan Anandan of AIADMK and Yashvir Singh of Samajwadi Party. 

Some other leaders whose birthdays fall during the session include Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar (Trinamul) and Rudra Madhab ay(BJD) on Wednesday, Prataprao Jadhav(Buldhana) of Shiv Sena on Friday, Minister of State Bharat Solanki on Saturday, MoS Jitin Prasada on Nov 29, former union minister Bijoy Handique and Vijay Singla (Cong-Punjab) on Dec 1, MoS Milind Deora on Dec 4 and Congress spokesman Manish Tewari on Dec 8.