Word: sonia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ADVANI: Since 1984, Congress has been shrinking and the BJP [has been] rising. And on the foreign origin [of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi], even the opposition is not ready to accept her as Prime Minister. It's not personal vilification. It's an issue...
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...
...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...
...remarkably selfless?and courageous?decision. All the more so because Sonia must have suspected what the rest of India would soon learn: that she would prove to be a woefully inadequate party leader. Described by friends as shy and private, Sonia comes across as almost devoid of charisma. She assiduously avoids reporters and, whenever possible, political events. She shows scant comprehension of economics or international affairs, and seems entirely out of touch with the galloping high-tech industry that's driving the economy. She refuses to respond to personal attacks over her foreign birth, or to make...