Foreigner with Indian traits

Sonia Gandhi, the wife of Rajiv Gandhi, and often heckled for her foreign birth in Indian politics, took charge as the Congress President today in 1998, after a blitzing campaign for the 1998 General Elections

Sonia Gandhi, Italian by birth and Indian by love; Source: Public Domain

Italy for her had been a promising land - and when Rajiv Gandhi had vowed to keep away from political life back in India, she had happily accompanied him home, thinking that it would be a comfortable life. However, as Sonia Gandhi was appointed the President of the Congress Party on the 14th of March, 1998, that non-involvement was far from the truth.

That journey was not easy, however. She had to lose her husband in a terrorist attack, had to learn how to campaign in a country with a very vast and different culture than hers, and had to overcome the biggest issue - her foreign birth.

Mrs. Gandhi would emerge on top of these issues in the 1998 campaign, which resulted in a hung assembly and then shifting alliance politics. However, she chose not to contest the post of Prime Minister herself, as Manmohan Singh would be appointed to that post in the 2004 and 2009 election victories.

Called the “Sonia Blitzkrieg”, her 1998 campaign and rise to power in the party was termed a spectacle.

Her accented Hindi, family legacy and impact on women and men seeing a ‘white’ woman speak Hindi and talk about struggles like loneliness after the loss of her husband - all struck a chord with the Indian audience.

Even as the BJP did emerge as the largest party, she still had managed to reverse the odds - Congress, long critiqued for corruption, cronyism and fraught with shrinking support, had managed to regain some of its vote share. This made life hard for the BJP, who had to wait one more year for their government to fully come into power.

Exhausted by a long campaign, heckled by the opponents, who thought a ‘Rome Raj’ was about to come, and compared to a return of the British Raj, she made the impossible possible for the Congress, for more than 15 years.