'Foreigner' Sonia Gandhi Confounds India's Political Pundits

[user-Narotham Reddy]

From: Joydeep Mitra <joy...@bcmp.med.harvard.edu>

'Foreigner' Sonia Gandhi Confounds India's Political Pundits

By JOHN F. BURNS: February 27, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>

PUNE, India -- After she arrived in India as a bride from her native
Italy 30 years ago, Sonia Gandhi extracted what proved to be a vain promise
from her husband, Rajiv Gandhi: He vowed he would stick to his life as
an airline pilot and never expose himself, his wife or his children to
the clamorous, often dangerous world of Indian politics.

After 34 days of hectic campaigning in India's general election, the
woman who started life as Sonia Maino, the Roman Catholic daughter of a
building contractor from a small town near Turin, is today the undisputed star
of the domain she once shunned.

At 51, Mrs. Gandhi has added an astonishing new chapter to the story
of the Nehrus and the Gandhis, the family that has done more to write
the political history of India in the 20th century than any other.

As campaigning across the country ended Thursday before the final round
of voting Saturday, there were few in India who doubted that Mrs. Gandhi
had turned the election upside down. Instead of the expected coronation
of the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mrs. Gandhi's
campaigning for the Congress Party has left many Indian forecasters
reluctant to guess what the final result will be.

In so doing, she has also overcome what could have been one of her
biggest political liabilities: her foreign birth.

During her campaign, Mrs. Gandhi has accomplished a remarkable
transformation, both of herself and of Indian politics. In place of the
reclusive widow she became after her husband's assassination in 1991, she has
emerged as a credible though still reluctant candidate for prime minister, the
post once held by her husband, her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and her
husband's grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Indians have been stunned. Even the fusty state broadcasting system, often
partial to the Hindu nationalists, has led many of its evening television
newscasts with reports on Mrs. Gandhi.

India Today, the country's most widely circulated news magazine, devoted
its cover and much else this week to "The Sonia Blitzkrieg," and compared her
performance, perhaps inevitably, to that of a diva in an Italian opera.

"It is a spectacle from start to end," the magazine said, citing Mrs.
Gandhi's "spaghetti English and accented Hindi," her "aggressive marketing"
of the Nehru-Gandhi family's political legacy and, above all, her impact
on the vast crowds that have gathered for her 140 campaign appearances,
estimated to have totaled more than 15 million people. "Women cry unabashedly
when she talks of her lonely existence, and others gawk at the 'white
woman' speaking Hindi," it said.

Even if the results, which are expected by Tuesday, show that the Hindu
nationalists have won, or have taken such a hold on Parliament as to make them
unstoppable at the head of a new coalition government, many Indians say
Mrs. Gandhi will have achieved something considered almost impossible --
reviving the Congress Party after long years of shrinking support
brought about by chronic corruption and cronyism.

Many Indians even say Congress may emerge as the leader of an alternative
coalition formed by 15 or more parties united by their determination to block
the Hindu nationalists. This would mark a watershed victory in a battle going
back decades, to the era of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the independence leader, who
was unremittingly opposed to the nationalists' barely disguised hostility for
the Muslim minority, now 120 million in a population of 980 million.

Most opinion polls now indicate that Congress will win 150 seats, perhaps
as many as 175, in the 545-seat Parliament, at least 100 more than many
politicians predicted before Mrs. Gandhi's campaign. On the other side, the
Hindu nationalists have watched with growing apprehension as forecasts of
their own seat count have receded, in some polls to as low as 210,
including seats that may be won by their allies.

For Mrs. Gandhi, the campaign has been an unmistakable ordeal. Growing
visibly more exhausted as the campaign wore on, and paler than usual in
the bright-hued saris that she wears as elegantly as any Indian, she has
traveled more than any other political leader. By executive jet and
helicopter, she has touched almost every corner of the country.

More startling even than the crowds that Mrs. Gandhi has attracted is
her apparent success in overcoming what Rajendra Singh, a powerful Hindu
nationalist hard-liner, put so bluntly: Mrs. Gandhi, although she holds
Italian and Indian citizenship, is "a foreigner with a white skin."

Initially the Hindu nationalists seemed perplexed by Mrs. Gandhi's role,
paying her scant attention. Then, as the polls showed the Congress Party's
support picking up, men like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani,
who would lead a Hindu nationalist government, became increasingly shrill,
warning of the dangers of a "foreign hand" or a "Rome Raj."

Few doubted that this was code for Mrs. Gandhi's Roman Catholicism, a
faith in which her son, Rahul, 27, and her daughter, Priyanka, 26, also
grew up.

Another powerful Hindu nationalist, Balasaheb Thackeray, tried to make
fun of Mrs. Gandhi, prancing about on election platforms in what he said
was an imitation of Mrs. Gandhi in her saris. He imitated her fractured
Hindi, and he proposed that India's Constitution be amended along U.S. lines,
to bar any foreign-born citizen from becoming president or prime minister.

If voters chose Mrs. Gandhi, Thackeray said, it might as well opt for
a resumption of colonial rule. "I would prefer handing back power to the
British, who have at least experience of ruling the country for 150
years," he said.

But if not enough of the 600 million voters cast ballots for her in anything
like the numbers suggested by her crowds, as some Indian skeptics suggest, the
experience along Mrs. Gandhi's campaign trail suggests it will almost certainly
not have been because of her Italian origins. At rally after rally, in state
after state, ordinary Indians said her origins were irrelevant, and often
then portrayed the issue as a matter so insulting that it should not
have been raised.

"If you call her a foreigner, I will not talk to you, not another word,"
said Prabhakar Mahule, 74, a pensioner who attended Mrs. Gandhi's final
rally, a gathering Wednesday in Pune, an old British garrison city 100
miles southeast of Bombay.

Displaying an identity card that showed him to be a "freedom fighter"
for having gone to jail in the 1940s for his role in the independence
struggle, Mahule added, "Those who are saying that Sonia is a foreigner,
they are not thinking on Indian lines."

At the Pune rally, as elsewhere, her supporters often focused on a Hindi
word, bahu, which means daughter-in-law but conveys a broader concept among
Hindus: that a woman becomes a member of her husband's family.

Mrs. Gandhi, speaking from Hindi texts written out for her in Roman script,
has made deft use of words like bahu and suhaag, the crimson mark that Hindu
women make in the parting of their hair as a symbol of marriage. The use
of such words has brought deep responses among men and women alike.

"She is bahu," said Gunvanti Sarwar, a 35-year-old mother of two who had
walked miles to the scrubland on the edge of Pune, where a crowd waited hours
past Mrs. Gandhi's scheduled arrival time, then stood and cheered deliriously
when her helicopter appeared in the sunset. "She married an Indian man, so
she is Indian. And we love her because, despite making many sacrifices
for India, she still offers herself."

The loss of her husband and her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, who died in
Sonia Gandhi's arms after being shot by Sikh security guards in New Delhi in
1984, is something that Sonia Gandhi has made a centerpiece of her campaign.
Aides say she still feels the bereavement keenly, but they acknowledge, too,
that Mrs. Gandhi is drawing on another deep well of sentiment in India,
the sympathy for a widow.

Watching her campaign rallies, it has seemed probable that Mrs. Gandhi's
nervousness has been born of something beyond political inexperience, perhaps
the fear that assassins could strike again, penetrating the so-called
Z-category security that Mrs. Gandhi has had since a suicide bomber, a
Sri Lankan woman, killed Rajiv Gandhi while he was campaigning outside
Madras in a national election.

The fears seemed a little more real Thursday night, when Congress Party
officials in New Delhi said police in Madhya Pradesh, in central India, had
found the severed body of a man lying beside a railway line. Next to the body,
the party officials said, police had found a bag containing a hand-drawn map
of two rally sites that Mrs. Gandhi had visited Wednesday and a drawing
showing where a bomb could be placed beneath the speakers' platforms.
Police in Madhya Pradesh offered no immediate confirmation.

Mrs. Gandhi's family and its losses have not been her only theme. A
campaign team composed mainly of Rajiv Gandhi's former aides has worked
at Mrs. Gandhi's sprawling government residence in New Delhi, tailoring
speeches peppered with references to local saints and heroes, usually
with a smattering of a local language in addition to Hindi.

In what many Indians see as a harbinger for another generation of Gandhis,
Priyanka Gandhi has played a key role in planning her mother's campaign and in
fine-tuning her speeches. One theory has it that even if Sonia Gandhi's
campaign fails, she will have laid the ground for an eventual Congress
Party comeback led by Priyanka Gandhi.

But at her rallies, Mrs. Gandhi has not played for the next round. After the
Hindu nationalists began mocking her personally, she traded punch for punch.
Among other things, she described the Bharatiya Janata Party as "those
associated with the Mahatma's assassins." The reference is to the party's
origins as a political front for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a secretive
Hindu nationalist group that counted among its members Nathuram Godse, who
killed Mohandas Gandhi on Jan. 30, 1948. Godse later said he had acted
because Gandhi was an "agent" for Muslims.

More than any other major campaigner, Mrs. Gandhi also dwelt on the need
for India to set aside disputes rooted in religion, ethnicity and caste, and
to concentrate on tackling poverty, illiteracy and disease. For this, she
said repeatedly, India needs foreign investment, another theme muted by many
politicians in the face of Hindu nationalist claims that "open door" economic
reforms have undermined Indian sovereignty.

But mostly, the crowds seemed to have embraced Mrs. Gandhi because of a
sense that she represents a simpler past, a time before the rise of scores of
splinter parties when voters could look to a single dominant party and a
charismatic leader.

"She is keeping alive the dream of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and
Rajiv Gandhi," said Ranjal Abhishok, a 20-year-old student at the Pune
rally. "She is reminding us that India is great."