Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SONIA GANDHI Wooed back as head of party, and may be India's P.M. Bigger dynasty than the Bushes...
India's movie industry specializes in raucous mythological epics; melodramatic histrionics are the mainstay of Italian opera. The two worlds collided in New Delhi this week with the triumphant return to politics of Sonia Gandhi. The Italian-born widow of slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi reclaimed the reins of her Congress party Tuesday, after rowdy protests, pleading deputations and even an attempted self-immolation by a despairing supporter coaxed her out of a self-imposed week in the political wilderness. Promising that "every drop of my blood belongs to this country," Gandhi galvanized party activists for a head-on battle...
...Gandhi's image as being above the rough-and-tumble of India's fractious coalition politics had suffered after she led the party in maneuvering to bring down the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in April, but failed to secure the necessary votes to take power herself. With few significant policy differences between the two major parties, September's election will be all about Sonia Gandhi. The Congress party has used the mythical power of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to rally jaded voters, while Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist party has vowed to make Gandhi's origins the centerpiece...
Talk about spin doctors. The furor in India's Congress party over the foreign origins of its leader, Sonia Gandhi, may yet turn out to be an elaborate form of political inoculation. Mrs. Gandhi resigned as party leader Monday, after three senior leaders wrote a letter insisting that no foreign-born person should be allowed to be in charge of India. The action came after Congress's fiercest rival, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), made clear that it planned to make Mrs. Gandhi's Italian birth the centerpiece of its campaign in an election bereft of policy issues...
...accomplished French author of the 1985 best seller The City of Joy recapitulates in honeyed prose more than a dozen stories he covered in his long career in journalism. He interviews the bullfighter El Cordobes and retraces Mahatma Gandhi's last moments. Much of the narrative runs to the cloyingly inspirational, and a good deal of it challenges credulity. For example, Caryl Chessman, awaiting execution at San Quentin, is portrayed as an intellectual who speaks in finely wrought sentences as he discourses about crime prevention, citing Albert Camus ("What a writer!"). Oh, what a mess...