NEW DELHI: The parents of India's ruling Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi opposed her marriage to former premier Rajiv Gandhi, US embassy cables provided by WikiLeaks revealed on Saturday.
Ms Gandhi, India's most powerful politician, also said in August 2006 she would “write a book someday with the whole story” as to why she did not take the job of premier in 2004 after engineering the Congress' surprise election win.
The unusually unguarded comments came in a conversation with Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and were contained in a cable on the meeting marked 'confidential'.
The cable was titled, “A garrulous Sonia Gandhi opens up to Maria Shriver,” suggesting how freely the normally reticent Indian leader chatted.
Ms Shriver met Italian-born Gandhi on an official visit to India. A reading of the cable indicates the conversation might have been taped by accompanying US embassy officials, the Times of India newspaper reported.
The cable says Ms Gandhi, who arrived in India as a shy bride in her early 20s, and is “reserved in public... revealed a rare glimpse of herself” as she spoke about women's issues and political life.
“Her comments and demeanour put the lie to cocktail party suggestions that she courts Manmohan Singh's job,” the cable said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a quiet economist who was vaulted to power when Ms Gandhi refused the premier's job after leading Congress to power in 2004.
The cable says: “Gandhi revealed her own parents objected to her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi and she 'resented their position' and went ahead and married him anyway.”
Rajiv Gandhi became premier in 1984 and was assassinated in 1991 by a suicide bomber.
The Congress leader, daughter of an Italian builder, met her husband in Cambridge, where he was studying at the university and she was studying English.
After her marriage she transformed into a sari-clad Indian who speaks fluent Hindi. Her years in the Gandhi household, when her strong-willed autocratic mother-in-law Indira – slain in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards – was premier, gave her an intimate insight into India's turbulent politics.
She took up politics after Rajiv Gandhi's death when “the right was becoming strong in India and Congress weak”.
The cable said Sonia Gandhi revealed left-of-centre leanings that supported a strong role for government in ensuring social progress and a staunch opposition to the social conservatism of the Hindu right.—AFP
