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Sonia Gandhi, 4th in a dynasty to rule India
In Response To: India elects Italian PM *LINK* ()

www.newsday.co.tt

NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi spent decades as a woman behind the scenes. Shy and Italian-born, she ran the household for her mother-in-law when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister, choosing menus and managing the servants. She did the same for her husband when he became prime minister, after his mother's assassination. Now, more than a decade after he too was slain, Sonia Gandhi is poised to become the latest in a long line of Gandhis to govern this sprawling nation. With the ruling Hindu nationalist alliance conceding defeat, a suddenly resurgent Congress Party and its allies appear set to take over the government - with Sonia Gandhi, 57, the most likely prime minister.

"The process of government formation will gather momentum" in coming days, Gandhi told reporters last night, after results were announced from parliamentary elections. Gandhi, who won her own seat, refused to say if she would become prime minister. It's certainly not what she expected when she arrived in India in 1968, a 21-year-old bride who didn't care much for Indian food. "I had a vague idea that India existed somewhere in the world with its snakes, elephants and jungles," she once wrote of her early days with husband Rajiv Gandhi at Cambridge University. Those days are over. She's been an Indian citizen since 1983 and a member of Parliament since 1999. She speaks fluent, if Italian-accented Hindi. Thousands of people turn out for her speeches.

But while Congress is likely to lead the next government, it still needs an alliance with other parties - and whether all would accept a foreign-born prime minister isn't clear. Party officials insist she'll get the post. "She will be the prime minister - 100 percent," said Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Congress Party's general secretary. Gandhi's Italian ancestry has long been her political weak point. During the campaign, her opponents hammered on her "foreignness" and political inexperience. But she dismisses such attacks, telling New Delhi Television in a rare interview that being born Italian means nothing to most voters. "I never felt they look at me as a foreigner," she said. "Because I am not. I am Indian." Also, whether intentional or not, she reminds many Indians of her mother-in-law: the way she wears her sari, her habit of striding ahead of aides.

To many Indians, she remains a "videshi bahu" - or "foreign-born daughter-in-law." To supporters, it's a term of endearment, a link to the dynasty that remains wildly popular through rural India. To critics, it's a reminder of her birth, and the power she gained through marriage. Some of Congress' success came from anger with the Bharatiya Janata Party, which led the ruling alliance. Analysts had predicted an easy BJP victory, as the party campaigned on a surging economy and what they called "Shining India." But for every new Indian software millionaire, there are millions of rural poor with no electricity. For them, the Gandhis have always been heroes.

Gandhi's son Rahul also made his political entry yesterday, winning a parliamentary seat in Amethi, the family's political stronghold. But it was her daughter Priyanka - a young mother who wasn't even running for office - who became a star, drawing huge crowds while campaigning for her mother and brother. Sonia Gandhi, a woman who had long tried to stay out of politics, was thrust to prominence with her husband's 1991 assassination. Seven years later, Congress officials desperate for a prominent name to help rebuild their stumbling party coaxed her into taking the party leadership. Slowly, she became a presence in politics. But she remains shy to the point of near-reclusiveness, and while she now campaigns diligently and makes regular speeches, she almost never gives interviews or news conferences. Her critics call her inexperienced and inaccessible. But she's always desperately guarded her privacy.

She wrote in a memoir that she "fought like a tigress" to keep the family's privacy as her husband's mother pulled him into politics. Raised in a middle-class Roman Catholic family outside Turin, Italy, she met Rajiv Gandhi at Cambridge, marrying into the dynasty that had dominated Indian politics, and the Congress, since independence from Britain in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, headed India from 1947 until his 1964 death. He was followed by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, whose often iron-fisted rule defined two decades of Indian life. Indira Gandhi was killed by her own bodyguards in 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi, an airline pilot, reluctantly stepped up. Riding a wave of sympathy, he easily won the following election. But he lost the prime minister's post in 1989 and was killed two years later while campaigning.

Victory for Sonia

DEMOCRACY is now enjoying the most glorious moment in its long history with the almost unbelievable victory of the Congress party in India. Nearly 380 million people, in an electorate of 675 million, voted in the three-week-long election which produced a stunning upset victory for the Congress party, ousting Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP which had governed the country over the last eight years and was regarded as a shoo-in for securing another term. Viewed from every angle, to begin with, the contest and its results must be seen as remarkable. The fact that a country as vast and diverse as India could conduct the central act of its democracy in such a free, fair and peaceful manner and produce results which express the people's will for change is something to wonder about, reinforcing in the minds of all freedom-loving societies the values of our political system.

The change in India is truly dramatic since, against all odds, it replaces the Hindu-nationalist BJP government with the Congress party thus giving a fresh lease on power to the Gandhi dynasty and raising the fascinating prospect of India having for its next Prime Minister the 57-year-old Italian-born widow of former premier Rajiv Gandhi who was assassinated in 1991. Vajpayee and his BJP government took a calculated gamble and lost. Such was their confidence of winning an even enlarged majority, that they called the elections six months early. Much was in their favour; based largely on a booming high-tech industry, growth in the Indian economy was surging; good monsoon rains had produced a bumper harvest; the prospects for a lasting peace with Pakistan seemed at hand and the party's sophisticated public relations campaign celebrating what they called "Shining India" appeared to be paying dividends.

They also sought to write off Mrs Gandhi as a foreigner. Small wonder that all the polls had predicted an easy BJP victory. As it turned out, the BJP either overlooked or under-estimated the three major factors which eventully swept the Congress party into office; the enduring romance of the Indian people with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which ruled India for 35 of its 57 independent years; the intense campaign led by Mrs Gandhi among the masses of the country's poor, and the support of the 300 million people still living below the poverty line who regard India's technological progress as benefitting only the upper urban classes. In a special sense, the victory of the Congress party is a personal triumph for Sonia Gandhi who, ironically enough, was forced to give up her reclusive life style, after the assassination of her husband, to assume the party's leadership.

Also the appearance on the hustings of her children, Rahul who enters the Parliament from Utta Pradesh, and fiery Priyanka - the new generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty - added strongly to the party's popularity. "The credit goes almost entirely to Sonia Gandhi, her tireless campaigning, the crowds she attracted and her personal popularity," said political commentator Pram Chopra. When she got married at the age of 21 to Rajiv who was then an airline pilot, Sonia had nothing more than the role of wife and mother in mind. In a spectacular twist of destiny, she has had greatness thrust upon her and now she faces the challenge of her life, perhaps to govern the world's largest democracy.

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India elects Italian PM *LINK*
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