I resolved it myself. For the benefit of others, the error was that mt .htaccess file was amended for multisite by kept in /var/www/html folder and /var/www/html/wordpress had another .htaccess file that did not have the ReWrite riles for the multisites. I moved the .htaccess file from /var/www/html/ to /var/www/html/wordpress/ and the Dashboard for the new site becomes visibile. This was for a sub directory based multisite.
