Sonia Gandhi: The power behind the Congress throne
NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi stepped down as head of India’s opposition Congress party yesterday after an extraordinary odyssey that transformed her from a shy housewife into the country’s most powerful politician and a torchbearer for the iconic GandhiNehru dynasty. The Italian-born Gandhi, 71, was thrust into the cauldron of Indian politics after marrying Rajiv Gandhi, scion of India’s political first family, in February 1968.
One of three daughters of an Italian building contractor, she arrived in India as a mini-skirt-wearing bride and converted into a sari-clad daughter-in-law, giving up her Italian citizenship for Indian nationality. Her years in the Gandhi household when her strongwilled, autocratic mother-in-law Indira was prime minister gave her a ringside seat to India’s turbulent history.
It was Sonia who cradled Indira Gandhi as she lay dying after being shot by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. She said she “fought like a tigress” to prevent Rajiv, a commercial pilot, from entering politics after his brother Sanjay-Indira’s first political heir-died piloting a small plane. After Indira’s assassination, Sonia feared politics might mean a violent death for her husband too, a vision that materialized when Rajiv was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber on the campaign trail in 1991. She then led a reclusive existence for six years, raising her two children.
Sense of duty
But in 1998, she accepted the entreaties of Congress leaders to join the political fray and give the party a Gandhi figurehead. A year later she was elected to parliament. In a rare television interview last year she said she had changed her mind “because of a certain duty that I felt towards my mother-in-law and my husband”. “I saw them struggle, work day and night to uphold certain values, certain principles,” she said. “When it came to my call, I felt that I was being cowardly not to respond to them.”Having been raised in a Roman Catholic family near Turin, she once confessed that before meeting her husband she had “only a vague idea India existed somewhere in the world”.
The pair met in Cambridge when Sonia was studying English at a language school and Rajiv was a mechanical engineering student at Trinity College. She said it was “love at first sight”. Sonia overcame stagefright to propel Congress to a surprise electoral win over the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in May 2004. She barnstormed the country, addressing huge rallies who shouted “Sonia Gandhi zindabad”-”Long Live Sonia Gandhi”. Speaking in Hindi, reading from a Roman text, she told audiences that her heart was “buried in the soil of this country”. ‘Inspirational story’
Poised to make history as India’s first-foreign born leader, but with Hindu rightwingers threatening mass protests and vowing to hound the “foreigner” out of office, she quietly declined the job of prime minister. She was dubbed “Saint Sonia” by Indian media for giving up leadership of the world’s largest democracy, an act that only enhanced the family mystique. But as Congress party president, she remained at the heart of decision-making. Her heavily guarded bungalow at Number 10 Janpath in the Indian capital became as vital an address to visit as the prime minister’s sprawling Race Course Road residence.