Word: indianism
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...with bemusement as showers of fragrant rose petals rain into his lap. It's a scene that has been repeated about 20 times in the past hour, and has at times threatened to bring the Congress Party election campaign to a complete halt as it crawls across the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, from Rahul's constituency of Amethi into Sonia's neighboring seat of Rae Bareli. Sonia has abandoned her own car after marigolds clogged the fan belt, and Rahul has lost a signet ring and some skin off his carelessly outstretched right hand. "This is chaos, chaos...
...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 and laid the foundations...
...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 Indira's colonial Lutyens bungalow. For 12 years, the couple enjoyed a life of easy privilege on the edge of India's first family, watching their...
...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, he refused. Said Sonia to an Indian journalist last month?only her second interview...
...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...