NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi stepped down as head of India’s
opposition Congress party on Saturday after an extraordinary odyssey
that transformed her from a shy housewife into the country’s most
powerful politician and a torchbearer for the iconic Gandhi-Nehru
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
strong-willed, 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 materialised 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 stage fright 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”, or 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
right-wingers 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.
Her biographer Rasheed Kidwai said it had been “an inspirational and exceptional success story”.
“She
understood India very well. She was successful in blunting allegations
of being an outsider and history will judge her very well on that
count,” he said.
Sonia delivered a second, bigger victory
for Congress in 2009, but the term was marred by massive corruption
scandals, including a telecoms graft case that cost the country up to
$40 billion.
There were also worries about Gandhi’s
health — in 2011 she had surgery in the United States for an undisclosed
illness thought to be cancer.
Three years later Congress
suffered its worst ever election defeat to Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s BJP after a campaign fronted by Sonia’s son Rahul, whose
political career she has tirelessly promoted.
Analysts
say Sonia saw herself as torchbearer for the dynasty that has given
India three Congress prime ministers — its first Jawaharlal Nehru, his
daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv — since independence from
Britain in 1947.
Such is the family’s aura that many
party supporters cannot conceive of a future without a Gandhi in charge,
even though critics decry the need for its continuation.
“If
you have a family whose earlier generations have been in politics it
gives you a head start,” she once said. “But India is a democracy ...
You may have an advantage at the beginning, but you have to work hard to
prove yourself.”
