NEW DELHI: Congress supporters regard the Gandhi family as India's monarchy. They had expected a coronation, not an abdication. But the fairytale of Sonia Gandhi ended before it had even begun.
Her Italian ancestry became a more important factor than the legacy of India's first political family, and she decided that she could not bear the responsibility.
Her announcement that she was stepping down as the Congress party's prime ministerial candidate prompted protests outside the Gandhis' colonial bungalow in Delhi. Thousands of Congress workers thronged the street, burning effigies of Hindu nationalist leaders and writing notes in blood asking her to reconsider.
Armed commandos surrounded the house to prevent the anger growing out of control. One former MP held a revolver to his head, threatening to commit suicide, before being overpowered by police officers.
"We don't know what to do," Salman Khurshid, a Congress MP close to the Gandhi family, told television reporters. "We cannot accept it. We cannot conceive it. We cannot imagine a government without Sonia Gandhi. We have worked very hard for this day and we want her to become prime minister."
MPs and party workers hoped that such outpourings would sway Mrs Gandhi. But she would not be swayed, and it was reported that she had named her closest political ally, Manmohan Singh, as the new Congress candidate.
Mr Singh, who was the architect of economic reforms in the Congress government of 1991, is considered a technically brilliant policymaker but a naive politician. Almost the opposite criticism is made of Mrs Gandhi, who sometimes seems vague on policy but has demonstrated a sure political touch.
There were also calls for her son Rahul, 34, who was elected to a northern Indian constituency once held by his father Rajiv, to become prime minister. But he too has rejected the idea in recent days, describing it as "ridiculous".
Political analysts say Mrs Gandhi's decision was unexpected but not inexplicable. On the campaign trail she repeatedly declined to promote herself as a candidate for prime minister. In no interview did she explicitly say that she wanted to run the country.
In the past few days, sensing a political opportunity, Hindu nationalists began to focus on her foreign origins, hoping to rekindle the kind of violent, xenophobic politics that transformed India in the 1990s.
Although most of the world's main religions are found in India, the population is 80 per cent Hindu. Mrs Gandhi understood the nature of the threat. Ever since she became president of the Congress party she has had to face down critics who asked why a foreigner should become prime minister of a country of a billion people.
In winning the general election last week she appeared to have won over the electorate by casting herself as an Indian patriot whose family had given up their lives for India.
BLOODY LEGACY
Her path to parliamentary politics has been a bloody one. Her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi was assassinated as prime minister in 1984, and her husband Rajiv, a former prime minister, was killed by a Tamil separatist suicide bomber in 1991.
She left public life soon after that, and returned only to save the Congress party from collapsing in 1998. Although she was not elected to parliament until 1999, she led the party out of the wilderness by lending a semblance of unity to its factions.
Considered a political novice, she campaigned tirelessly and managed to connect with India's most important constituency: the rural voter. She has also made sure that her children learned the political ropes, ensuring Congress a future supply of leaders with the Gandhi name.
But the increasing number of threats from the Hindu nationalists and the reluctance of the defeated Bharatiya Janata party to tone down its rhetoric led her to believe that taking up the role of prime minister would divide the country.
The attitude was typified by Uma Bharti, a former federal minister, who on Tuesday resigned as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in protest. "A foreigner becoming the prime minister of the country will put national security and the country's self-respect in jeopardy," she told a television interviewer.
Moreover, Mrs Gandhi's children, Rahul and Priyanka, had become increasingly concerned that her life would be in danger if she became prime minister. The result was Mrs Gandhi made the greatest sacrifice in politics: she gave up power.
The other day she told Congress MPs that becoming prime minister had never been her aim. "My aim was to strengthen the secular fabric of the country. I waged a struggle against communal forces and with this success we should not stop.
"I request you to accept my decision," she said, adding that she would not change her mind. "It is my conscience. My responsibility at this critical time is to provide India with a secular government that is strong and stable."
In the oak-panelled central hall of the Indian parliament stunned MPs poured out their support and mobbed her, at times preventing her from continuing her speech. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former civil servant, was on the verge of tears as she said: "You want us to wage a struggle but without your leadership, how can we do that?"
But her decision not to take office may have been informed by events six years ago when senior Congress MPs openly questioned whether someone of foreign birth should be at the helm.
Angered, she resigned from the party presidency, but she recanted after supporters pleaded with her to stay and her detractors were expelled from Congress. Most are now allies of the Congress party.
No one expects that she will change her mind once again. Rajdeep Sardesai, political editor of New Delhi television, told viewers: "The decision is likely to go down well with the people of India.
"Finally you have a politician who will put India before personal ambition. Mrs Gandhi and her family would have taken a long time to consider this." -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
