Sonia Gandhi welcomes U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to her residence, 10 Janpath in New Delhi, India, 2009
Congress President
member, she was offered the party President post which she accepted. She contested Lok Sabha elections from Bellary, Karnataka and Amethi, Uttar Pradesh in 1999. In Bellary she defeated veteran BJP leader, Sushma Swaraj. In 2004 and 2009, she was re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh. She was elected the Leader of the Opposition of the 13th Lok Sabha in 1999. When the BJP-led NDA formed a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, she took the office of the Leader of Opposition. As Leader of Opposition, she called a no-confidence motion against the NDA government led by Vajpayee in 2003. She holds the record of having served as Congress President for 10 years consecutively. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and her refusal to become Prime Minister, the party settled on the choice of P. V. Narasimha Rao who became leader and subsequently Prime Minister. Over the next few years, however, the Congress fortunes continued to dwindle and it lost the 1996 elections. Several senior leaders such as Madhavrao Sindhia, Rajesh Pilot,Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Arjun Singh, Mamata Banerjee,G. K. Moopanar, P. Chidambaram and Jayanthi Natarajan were in open revolt against incumbent President Sitaram Kesri and quit the party, splitting the Congress into many factions. In an effort to revive the party’s sagging fortunes, she joined the Congress Party as a primary member in the Calcutta Plenary Session in 1997 and became party leader in 1998. In May 1999, three senior leaders of the party (Sharad Pawar, P. A. Sangma, and Tariq Anwar) challenged her right to try to become India’s Prime Minister because of her foreign origins. In response, she offered to resign as party leader, resulting in an outpouring of support and the expulsion from the party of the three rebels who went on to form the Nationalist Congress Party. Within 62 days of joining as a primary
UPA Chairperson
On 23 March 2006, Gandhi announced her resignation from the Lok Sabha and also as chairperson of the National Advisory Council under the officeof-profit controversy and the speculation that the government was planning to bring an ordinance to exempt the post of chairperson of National Advisory Council from the purview of office of profit. She was re-elected from her constituency Rae Bareilly in May 2006 by a margin of over 400,000 votes. As chairperson of the National Advisory Committee and the UPA, she played an important role in making the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the Right to Information Act into law. She addressed the United Nations on 2 October 2007, Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary which is observed as the international day of non-violence after a UN resolution passed on 15 July 2007. Under her leadership, India returned the Congress-led-UPA to a near majority in the 2009 general elections with Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister. The Congress itself won 206 Lok Sabha seats, which was the highest total by any party since 1991. Sonia is the widow of late Rajiv Gandhi, elder son of Indira Gandhi. She is a practising Christian. There has been considerable media speculation for over a decade about their future role in the Congress. After a period of uncertainty, both Rahul and Priyanka became primary members of the Congress party. While Priyanka has so far restricted herself to organising her mother’s election campaigns and taking care of Sonia’s constituency, Rahul Gandhi has gone on to take formal charge as General Secretary of the Congress Party. He is also currently head of the Youth Congress. In August 2011, she underwent a successful surgery for some ailment in the US. It has been widely speculated in the media that the surgery took place at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Newspapers reported that she returned to India on 9 September after her treatment.
I love Sonia Gandhi most. I hope I will meet her shortly.