Posted on 05/13/2004 5:10:55 PM PDT by JeffersonMadison
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 Thursday 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 Thursday, 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.
Indeed, it is sad to see that the voters want to *attempt* to "spread the wealth" via the heavy hand of government. India's potential for economic demise now rests upon how leftist/socialist Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party can effectively become. Hopefully the nationalist/rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can still save the day. Since free trade and economic growth brings prosperity to all countries involved, unlike BS "fair trade" and "economic justice," India's possible economic rise can even be seen as beneficial to the global economy. Unfortunately, this leftist election victory at best means that worldwide betterment will be slower in coming.
Geez, talk about a family dynasty...
Geopolitical implications?
Please include original titles.
Thanks.
Indeed, it is sad to see that the voters want to *attempt* to "spread the wealth" via the heavy hand of government. India's potential for economic demise now rests upon how leftist/socialist Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party can effectively become. Hopefully the nationalist/rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can still save the day. Since free trade and economic growth brings prosperity to all countries involved, unlike BS "fair trade" and "economic justice," India's possible economic rise can even be seen as beneficial to the global economy. Unfortunately, this leftist election victory at best means that worldwide betterment will be slower in coming.The BJP was no prize either, being a gang of religious bigots rivaling the Muslim fundamentalists. India's voters were faced with a choice akin to one between the Daley families corrupt governmental paternalism and Pat Robertson with his own quasi-military organization (the BJP is closely allied to the RSS). Or to put it in more regional terms, a choice between Afghanistan's old socialist government and the Taliban.
Moderation caused by Congress's coalition partners may be the best possible choice. They wouldn't be the first big government socialists to learn the power of the free market. But India won't ever become truly modern until it develops a secular free-market party like the GOP.
-Eric
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=33a5e14f66ab080406286e32d5f8a1c1
The Nanny Vote: India's Election Results Defeat Pollsters
Commentary, Sandip Roy,
Pacific News Service, May 13, 2004
Editor's Note: India's voters confounded surveys by choosing the Congress Party, led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, instead of the ruling BJP. Who are these unpredictable Indian voters?
"Stunning" is the word everyone is using to describe the Indian electoral results. The verdict in India, however, didn't stun Indians. It stunned the pollsters, who had all confidently predicted that the ruling BJP coalition would return to power. The only question was the margin of victory.
Watching the steady drip of Kerry-47, Bush-45 American polls here, I realize how much juice opinion polls suck out of the electoral process, becoming in the end self-fulfilling prophesies. At a time when elections seem to turn into a mere validation of the opinion polls, there is a sense of cheeky delight in how an electorate can actually hoodwink the pollsters.
Perhaps the pollsters with their fancy bar graphs and pie charts never actually asked the people who really voted in the slums of Mumbai or the dusty forgotten villages of India's cow belt. Some analysts now say the "India Shining" ad campaign by the ruling party, which touted India's economic boom, only served to highlight how much of India, in villages and small towns, felt left behind.
Others are pointing to the recent Spanish elections and the gains made by the communist parties in India to predict the grand comeback of the Left. What I see in the electoral victory rather than sweeping trends and swings, is the quiet victory of old Jamuna.
Jamuna was our domestic help-nanny cum neighborhood gossip and repository of family history. She had presided over my father's wedding, potty-trained my sister and me and watched my sister's first child being born.
Barely literate, she was the object of our pitiless education campaign. While I tried to teach her to say "salt" "sugar" and "thank you" in English, my mother would try to teach her how to vote -- and who to vote for -- come every election.
Jamuna could not really read the names of the parties. She memorized the symbols they stood for. She listened to what my mother had to say, but, in the end, obstinately voted for whomever she felt loyal to. Every election, without fail, she put on her old white sari and trudged to the polling station with my mother and sister where they all stood in line to vote. At home there was a strict class hierarchy that could not be breached between her and my mother. But at the polling place they stood in the same line. And in the privacy of the booth, Jamuna voted her mind, not her boss'.
I doubt any of the pollsters had asked Jamuna what she felt. In Shining India Inc. she did not matter. Luckily the Jamunas of India don't read the polls either, and they still haven't lost faith in the power of the vote.
The lesson of India is a bizarre one for poll watchers here. It confounds Bill Clinton's famous "It's the economy, stupid" slogan, which has President Bush now touting every favorable tic in the economic index. India's economy was booming. There were no terrorist attacks as had happened in Spain, and the prospects of peace with Pakistan were more real than ever before. And Sonia Gandhi, who had led her Congress Party to its worst-ever electoral debacle in 1999, was regarded as an inexperienced, uncharismatic politician whose foreign origins (she is Italian-born) and stilted Hindi cut her off from India's vast electorate.
India's electoral turnaround will now be sliced and diced by all kinds of pundits. Who voted -- was it the youth or the housewives? Did the ruling party's more conservative Hindu voters stay home? Did the poor vote while the rich were watching the stock market? Was it just anti-incumbency vote? Did the electoral debut of Rahul Gandhi, the first in the newest generation of Gandhi children coming of age, galvanize youths?
But the lesson to me is simply this. Voters -- here or in India -- can tell pollsters it's the economy they care about, or crime or the war in Iraq. But then they can defy every bar chart and just vote the way they felt on the way to the polling station.
"I thought you were going to vote for the party with the lamp symbol," my mother would tell Jamuna.
"I changed my mind," Jamuna replied, and refused to give any reason. Dead now for a decade, old Jamuna must be relishing the "stunning" victory that put the people back into the elections of the world's largest democracy.
Enough Indians are making too much money off of outsourcing. Palms are being greased as we speak, and the Congress' Communist party allies are magically metamorphing into capitalists as we speak.
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