Word: rajiv
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...allure to the notion that India's election result marks the ordained resurrection of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. Its improbable return to power, atop a messy and probably fragile coalition of the Congress Party was led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of slain former Prime Minister Rajiv, who was son of the legendary prime minister Indira Gandhi (also assassinated), herself daughter of the country's legendary first prime minister, Jawarahalal Nehru, the father of modern India. As if to highlight the dynastic allure of her party, Sonia had her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka play leading roles...
...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 for the country's current explosive economic growth. But today, Congress has atrophied into a party bereft of fresh people and ideas, and one that also appears lamentably out of sync with India's new dynamism...
...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...
...nation, prompting the joke that she is inarticulate in three languages. And experience has failed to make her a more inspired political player. At a rally last month in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, she resorted to the same lame vow?"The things that Indira and Rajiv believed in, I stand for them also"?as when she first assumed the Congress leadership. On the campaign trail she agrees to every supporter's request?fix the water, build a road, reopen someone's husband's factory?with a harried and unconvincing "Yes, we will do it." With her mournfully heavy...