Intensely Private Sonia Gandhi Now Is Cast Into Glare of India Politics : Dynasty: The wife who shunned the limelight may find herself trapped, much like her late husband, into assuming his party’s mantle of power.

Sonia Gandhi was in no mood for outsiders. She was with her people now, working for her husband, barnstorming his dusty, crushingly poor voting district several hundred miles southeast of the nation’s capital.

“No, no, sorry, no interviews, no pictures, please,” she said, hiding her face and all but pushing away the reporter and photographer who had stumbled onto her election campaign party in a tiny village of the huge Amethi district during India’s last hard-fought campaign in November, 1989.

“Please excuse her,” said a local leader of the Congress-I Party, the singular political force that was controlled by her husband, then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

“She doesn’t really like the press. She doesn’t like politics, either. But she knows she isn’t a politician, and this isn’t politics to her. She really feels that these are her people, her family.”

And it is this same aloof Sonia Gandhi, the 43-year-old daughter of an Italian industrialist from Turin, who was nominated on Wednesday to replace her husband as the president of India’s oldest and longest-ruling political party.

She spent the day grieving beside the teak, flag-draped coffin that contained her late husband--slain by an assassin’s bomb so powerful that the family, contrary to Hindu tradition, was forced to seal the coffin. And as she grieved, Sonia Gandhi made it clear through intermediaries that, like that day in Amethi, she had no interest in the party’s wishes.

“I don’t like being in the limelight,” she once said in one of her rare interviews. “It’s not something extraordinary. It’s just my habit.”

But there are several extraordinary things about the intensely private woman who served as India’s First Lady during the five years until late 1989 that her husband was prime minister, an era that ushered in the third generation of Nehru family leaders.

First, she speaks six languages, including fluent Hindi, the national language of India. Rather than deliver empty speeches to the villagers of Amethi, her campaign tours went from mud hut to mud hut, personal chats that, according to the villagers, made them feel a part of the prime minister’s family. And in 1983, she chose to surrender her Italian passport, swearing loyalty to the Indian nation simply to silence her husband’s critics who called her a national security threat because she was a foreigner.

Sonia Gandhi’s life commitment was to her husband, who also was forced into politics by a dynasty that left him with little choice.

By all accounts, it was love at first sight in 1964, when a precocious and underachieving Rajiv Gandhi met the striking Sonia Maino at Cambridge University in England. He was studying mechanical engineering, before he dropped out to tour Europe with Sonia. She was studying English.

When the couple married four years later in New Delhi, where Gandhi was quoted as describing his bride as “a straightforward, intelligent woman,” his mother, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, made it clear that she did not approve. It was wrong, she told friends, for a man who could inherit India’s reins of power to marry a non-Indian.

But nearly a decade later, Indira Gandhi fell from power, suffering a crushing defeat in the Congress-I’s first election loss since India’s independence in 1947. And it was during her two years out of power (she returned with a massive majority in 1979) that the two women grew close.

From then on, both mother and son fiercely protected Sonia Gandhi’s need for privacy from an inquisitive public. In fact, Rajiv told an interviewer that his wife was among the main reasons he was so reluctant to enter politics, even in the face of pressure from his mother after his younger, intensely political, brother, Sanjay, died in a 1980 plane crash.

“Sonia, who disliked to be in the public eye, discouraged me from entering this field,” Gandhi was quoted as saying by the United News of India news agency after he finally decided to enter the Amethi parliamentary race during a mid-term election.

“But, at last, she gave me the green signal. . . . She’s an introvert and simply does not like the spotlight.”

On Wednesday, the spotlight was firmly focused on the widow, who now must not only raise her daughter, Priyanka, who is living with her in India, and her son, Rahul, who is studying in the United States, but must search her heart to determine whether she can give that same green signal to herself.

“If Sonia accepts this presidency, not only I but the entire Indian nation will be stunned,” said one New Delhi politician who knows her and asked to remain anonymous. “It goes directly against her grain. It goes against the grain of democracy.

“But, then again, these people can be quite persuasive, and this is the most difficult, and probably loneliest, moment of her life. Anyone who hates the limelight needs a partner in the shadows, and now hers is gone.

“She might be persuaded there is no choice but to accept the (party) presidency to help save the Congress. . . . But prime minister? Never.”

Profile: Sonia Gandhi

Born: Dec. 9, 1947

Birthplace: Turin, Italy

Education: Cambridge University, England

Personal: She and Rajiv Gandhi met in 1964 while students at Cambridge University; they were married in 1968. She speaks six languages, including Hindi; gave up her Italian passport in 1983 and became an Indian citizen; two children, a son, Rahul, 20, and daughter, Priyanka, 21.

Quote: “I don’t like being in the limelight. It is not something extraordinary. It is just my habit.”