Gandhi: Part of History and Controversy

Sonia Gandhi, the woman who Thursday staged one of India’s memorable electoral comebacks, is a reluctant politician with a distaste for the rough and tumble of politics.

Gandhi is said to have threatened to divorce her husband, Rajiv, after he decided to enter politics to succeed his assassinated mother and former prime minister, Indira Gandhi.

After Rajiv’s assassination in 1991, Sonia Gandhi became a virtual recluse. She avoided Indian politics and tried to shield her two children from it.

But in 1998, two years after Hindu nationalists won power for the first time under Atal Behari Vajpayee, Congress Party leaders persuaded her to lead their party and fight for a secular India that treated all religions equally.

If she becomes India’s prime minister, as expected, the 57-year-old Gandhi will be the first foreign-born person to hold the position.

She was first elected to India’s Parliament in 1999 after leading the Congress Party to its worst-ever electoral defeat. Her Italian birth left many people convinced that she didn’t have the strength or political savvy to revive the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

During the recent campaign, her opponent focused on her “foreignness.”

But in a rare interview with Indian television, Gandhi, who speaks Italian-accented Hindi, said most voters didn’t care that she was not native born.

“I never felt they look at me as a foreigner,” she said. “Because I’m not. I am Indian.”

Her election may draw the wrath of religious extremists and hard-line nationalists.

Gandhi was born Sonia Maino into a Roman Catholic family in Orbassano, about 50 miles from the Italian city of Turin. She met her husband in the 1960s when she was studying English at Cambridge University.

They married in 1968. Her fate changed forever when she became a Gandhi.

The Gandhi bloodline has dominated the Congress Party, and India’s politics, from the country’s birth in 1947. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, ruled until 1964. Two years later, his daughter Indira Gandhi took power, and remained prime minister until 1984. She was briefly out of office from 1977 to 1980.

Sonia Gandhi’s son, Rahul, won a seat in Parliament on Thursday in his first run for public office. He was elected in the family’s traditional stronghold of Amethi, in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

He is a Harvard graduate who owns a computer consulting company and has lived for many years in the U.S. and Britain. But, like his parents, he angered many Indians by falling in love with a foreigner.

In December, a retired Indian professor filed a complaint with police, insisting they charge Rahul Gandhi and his Colombian girlfriend because they had spent a three-day holiday together at a lake resort in Kerala state and were not married.

Police dismissed the complaint as a publicity stunt. Now that he is a member of Parliament, Rahul Gandhi can expect the attacks to intensify.

His younger sister, Priyanka, married in 1997, and her husband’s brother and father were reported to be Hindu extremists from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, which gave birth to Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

RSS supporters constantly malign Sonia Gandhi for her Italian roots. Priyanka is considered a rising political star eager to carry on India’s most famous political name.