Sonia Gandhi was poised on Saturday night to be the fourth member of the dynasty to lead India after the Congress party chose her unanimously as its parliamentary head.
Standing under life-sized portraits of former prime ministers, including her assassinated husband Rajiv, her mother-in-law, Indira, and Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, she told party workers: ”Very shortly, a Congress-led coalition will be in place.”
Her party said it would be the pivot of the new government and that her coalition would be ”inclusive, secular and united” — a dig at the rival Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).
Congress is the largest party in the new Parliament after its surprise victory in last week’s elections, but it must win over left-wing parties. On her own Gandhi has 145 seats, well short of the 272 required to run the country.
In some hectic horse-trading, Congress conceded key demands to the left. It looks certain that India’s privatisation programme, a key BJP policy, will be curtailed.
The Communist Party of India, which has 10 seats, demanded the scrapping of the Disinvestment Ministry, the powerhouse of state sell-offs, something that looks likely to happen.
”We do not believe in a blanket privatisation of our public-sector companies,” said Jairam Ramesh, part of Congress’s economic team. Such moves are likely to further unsettle India’s stock market, which had its largest loss in four years on Friday.
The election of Italian-born Gandhi (57) marks a new phase in Indian politics, which most commentators had believed before the election was in the grip of the BJP. In reaching out to India’s 300-million poor people, Gandhi tapped into rising anger at the gap emerging between rural and urban India to register the most remarkable political victory for a generation.
Analysts said the BJP campaign, focusing on India’s booming economy, failed to capture the public imagination because nothing had changed for many voters.
Gandhi, the first foreign-born leader of India, made the most of the family name. Three generations of the family have ruled India for more than 35 of the 57 years since its independence from Britain in 1947.
Her son Rahul (34) is the fifth generation of the Gandhi clan to enter politics, winning a seat in a northern constituency previously held by his father. There have already been calls to make him general secretary of Congress, but analysts say he is likely to stay in the background to learn politics in a Parliament where intrigue and betrayal are daily events.
His mother had a steeper learning curve. Before marrying Rajiv Gandhi and coming to India in 1968, Sonia told an interviewer she had only ”a vague idea India existed somewhere in the world”. — Guardian Unlimited Â