14 May 2004	Friday	23 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

NEW DELHI, May 13: Just weeks ago, few people gave Sonia Gandhi even a ghost of a chance of forming a government. But on Thursday, she defied all pollsters and pundits and looked set to take the top job in India.

The daughter of a Turin builder who married into India's first family more than 30 years ago, Sonia Gandhi was boosted by a wave of anger among millions of rural poor, who voted out the BJP after feeling left out of an economic boom.

"The credit goes almost entirely to Sonia Gandhi, her tireless campaigning, the crowds she attracted and her personal popularity," said political commentator Pran Chopra. "Her foreign origin, obviously, did not have an impact on voters."

Few had expected Sonia to plunge into the hurly-burly of Indian politics when her husband was killed at a political rally just a few years after his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her own security guards. But that didn't stop Sonia Gandhi. "That's part of political lives and my mother-in-law and my husband lived and died for the country. I don't believe they wished to die in any other way," Sonia Gandhi, 57, said in a recent interview.

Shrugging aside the tragedies that struck her family, India's main opposition leader kept up a gruelling pace throughout the three-week election, addressing rally after rally to prop up her Congress party's poll prospects.

Many political analysts had written off Gandhi and her Congress party before the elections, but in the end the magic of the dynasty worked like a charm. Gandhi initially trailed her rival, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. But the political tide turned thanks to strong campaigning by the Gandhi family, particularly Sonia, who drew massive crowds all the way from the rural hinterland of northern India to the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

The entry of her charismatic children, son Rahul and daughter Priyanka, helped her party's fortunes, but at the end of the day it was Sonia's tireless campaigning that brought Congress in from the cold despite relentless attacks from the ruling party.

BJP campaigners regularly attacked her foreign origin, but she always dismissed the jibes and insisted she was Indian. Often mocked for her "spaghetti English", she mostly speaks in Hindi, and wears the traditional sari or the shalwar-kurta shirt and trousers.

"Wherever I go, wherever I have been...I have never ever been made to feel like I am not like everyone else, so it doesn't hurt at all," she said in an interview on the campaign trail.

Many educated urban Indians are not comfortable about a foreigner as prime minister, but in her Rae Bareli constituency people fondly described Sonia as their "daughter-in-law".

It's a long way from her days as a reclusive widow who rarely stepped out of her fortified bungalow in Delhi, and if she did, she never spoke a word. Sonia Gandhi only entered politics in 1998 at the party's pleading following a crushing electoral defeat. Once called the "Sphinx", she was forced to quickly change her inaccessible image.

Today, most of her speeches are peppered with emotional references to her family, especially her mother-in-law and her husband, killed by a suicide-bomber in Tamil Nadu state in 1991.

During an emotive rally in Tamil Nadu during this election, Sonia said she was ready to suffer the same fate as her husband. "As I stand on this soil with which the blood of my husband has mingled, I say I will not hesitate to share this honour."

India is a long way from where Sonia Gandhi was born, the daughter of a small-time builder in Orbussano, near Turin, Italy. At 18 she went to Cambridge, England, not, as detractors often cattily note, to attend the university but to learn English. There the young and glamorous Sonia Maino met Rajiv who was studying at Cambridge University. It was love at first sight.

Ignoring objections from her family she married Rajiv in a Hindu ceremony at 21 and took up her role as dutiful daughter-in-law to his mother, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

When her pilot husband was propelled into politics after his brother's death in a 1980 flying accident, Sonia resisted the move fiercely. "I fought like a tigress - for him, for us and our children, for the life we had made together, his flying which he loved, our uncomplicated, easy friendships, and, above all, for our freedom," she wrote in a book on her husband.

"I was angry and resentful towards a system which, as I saw it, demanded him as a sacrificial lamb. It would crush him and destroy him - of that I was absolutely certain."-Reuters