Word: gandhi
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From inside the Gandhi SUV, there's little sign of looming disaster. Sonia, 57, is sitting up front; her children Rahul, 33, and Priyanka, 32, are behind, and all three are beaming out at a crush of villagers who envelop the silver jeep and whose faces and skinny bodies are sliding across its windows like a human car wash. Sonia opens her door to stand on the sill, and the crowd shrieks and surges forward, a hundred arms straining for a supplicatory touch of her feet. Priyanka waves, and a tight knot of some 100 hands waves back. Rahul opens...
...This is not how you might picture a political dynasty headed for a humiliating fall. But as India votes over the next three weeks in its first general election of the 21st century, the truth is that the ardent reception the Gandhis are attracting is more about their place in Indian political lore than about Congress's current electoral standing. The Gandhis and Congress won India its independence and gave it leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi (not a relation), Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. They ruled India for 45 of its first 50 years...
...Sonia Maino never wanted anything to do with politics. She was born in the small village of Orbassano in northern Italy, and at 19 met 21-year-old Rajiv Gandhi in 1965 at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge, England, where they both were undergraduates. "For him, there was never anybody else," says a family friend. "For her, too." The couple married in 1968 in New Delhi. Rajiv became a pilot for Indian Airlines and Sonia threw herself into running the house for her Prime Minister mother-in-law Indira, managing the servants and organizing receptions under the lemon trees behind...
...cycle of death that drew Sonia into politics began in June 1980. Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in New Delhi and, over Sonia's angry objections, Rajiv insisted that his duty to family and country obliged him to replace his brother as his mother's right-hand man. Then, in October 1984, Indira's Sikh bodyguards assassinated her to avenge the Indian army's storming of the Sikh Golden Temple to root out militants sheltered inside. In a hospital, over her mother-in-law's dead body, Sonia again begged Rajiv to put family before politics and, again...
...today's economic growth is now widely seen as a collection of distinguished but inactive has-beens who are blind to the party's present ignominies. Nowadays, the party's sole identifiable belief?beyond its vaguely left-of-center economics?seems to be an awed deference to the Gandhis. The only election slogan Congress supporters ever use is: "Sonia Gandhi! Rahul Gandhi! Priyanka Gandhi!" As one Indian correspondent derisively puts it: "Today's Congress is a personality cult. Only with no personality, and a dying cult...