NEW DELHI -
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi is reluctant to become India's
next prime minister because of controversy over her
Italian birth, but her party is pressing her to accept the
job after her upset win in the national election,
unconfirmed local reports claimed on Tuesday.
However, one of her aides said on Tuesday that
Gandhi, 57, would be sworn in on Wednesday as premier:
"I am announcing this today that she will be taking oath
on the 19th," said A B Bardhan, leader of the Communist
Party of India, which is allied with Gandhi's Congress.
Sonia Gandhi herself was less specific.
Addressing the media outside the presidential palace,
where she had talks with A P J Abdul Kalam, she said: "
We shall meet the president again tomorrow with letters
of support from all coalition partners and then we shall
proceed from there."
Gandhi was
accompanied by senior Congress leader Manmohan Singh, a
former finance minister, now widely tipped to be the
prime minister if Gandhi declines.
Speculation
had mounted that Gandhi would decline the premiership
after the communist parties said they would only
support, not join, the government and the defeated Hindu
nationalists said that they would boycott her
swearing-in because she was not Indian by birth.
"One TV channel tried to spread the rumor. It is
totally wrong," Bardhan told a news conference at
Gandhi's residence in central New Delhi. Bardhan said
that leaders of all Gandhi's allies rushed to her home
after the rumor had spread.
Gandhi has the
support of some 220 members in the 543-member house,
while the communist parties - the Communist Party of
India and the Communist Party of India-Marxist - have 62
seats.
Investors fear that Gandhi may have to
renege on her pledge to continue with economic
liberalization, or that the communists, with their
pivotal vote, could block reforms such as the
privatization of state-run companies. Those fears sent
the Bombay Stock Exchange plummeting on Monday in its
worst one-day dive since it was established in 1875. The
country's other indices also dropped.
However,
on Tuesday the 30-share Mumbai stock exchange's
Sensitive index jumped 371.86, or 8.3 percent, to
4,877.02 at the close. That's its biggest one-day gain
since March 1, 1999. The S&P/CNX Nifty Index of 50
stocks on the National Stock Exchange gained 113.5, or
8.2 percent, to 1,502.25.
Gandhi's political
opponents and the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), although routed at the polls, are
determined not to let her forget her foreign origins. On
Monday, BJP president Venkaiah Naidu announced that his
party and its partners in the outgoing BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) would boycott the solemn
ceremony of Gandhi being sworn in as premier, usually
conducted at the grand presidential palace or
Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Only Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
the gentlemanly outgoing prime minister, would attend,
meaning that almost half the members of the new Lok
Sabha or lower house of parliament will stay away to
protest the assumption by a "foreigner" of India's most
powerful job. The hostility is such that, for
instance, top BJP leader Sushma Swaraj and her husband
Kaushal have announced plans to resign from their seats
in the Rajya Sabha or upper house so that they do not
have to address Gandhi as "madam prime minister".
Swaraj and those close to her have been trying
to whip up sentiment against Sonia Gandhi, widow of
former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, around India's
struggle against centuries of foreign rule and
independence in 1947.
In fact, the entire future
political strategy of the BJP seems to be centered
around Gandhi's racial origins, although the issue
failed to cut any ice with voters during the campaign
for the April/May elections that ended last week.
What mattered to the voters was the fact that
Gandhi carried herself through the campaign with
tremendous dignity, as befits the daughter-in-law of a
family that has given the country three prime ministers
- Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, Indira
Gandhi, and her husband.
It also mattered to the
average voter that Gandhi constantly showed concern for
ordinary people during her extensive road shows and
election tours, brushing aside her bodyguards to embrace
an old woman here and cuddle a baby in a village there.
"Sonia walked into my house and asked after my
family - no one from the BJP has even bothered to come
to our village in years," recalls Munni Devi, who lives
in a village near Gurgaon, the glittering cybercity
taking shape in Haryana to the south of the national
capital.
As she criss-crossed the country by
road and air, Indians turned out to hear the bahu
or daughter-in-law of the country speak to them of her
plans to dispel poverty in surprisingly good Hindi - and
in a manner reminiscent of her late mother-in-law Indira
Gandhi, who was regarded as a divine being by many
Indians.
The more the swaggering leaders of the
BJP railed about her foreign origins, the more the
people turned out to see her and her fresh-faced and
sincere-sounding children Rahul and Priyanka - who often
accompanied Sonia on the demanding campaign trail.
According to Dilip Cherian, who runs the agency
that managed her publicity, Gandhi seemed to strike a
chord with women voters, many of whom are in fact
outsiders in their husband's homes.
At the press
conferences she gave after elections were declared,
Gandhi constantly referred to the grinding poverty,
unemployment and the distress of farmers that she saw on
her tours - impressions that were far removed from the
"India Shining" motto that the BJP leaders wanted voters
to believe.
She deftly deflected attempts by the
BJP to convert the elections into a presidential-style
contest of personalities by declaring that the
leadership of the country would be decided by the voters
rather than be imposed on them.
In fact,
everything that the BJP could throw at her was like
water off a duck's back - even attempts to revive an
allegedly sweetened deal to buy Swedish artillery that
cost her husband Rajiv Gandhi the 1989 parliamentary
elections.
Much was made during the campaign of
Sonia Gandhi's plebeian background and how she waited
tables in a Greek restaurant in Cambridge, where she
first met her princely husband, who at the time was more
interested in sports cars and beautiful women than in
completing his course at Trinity College.
Gandhi's prince charming took her home to his
mother, the formidable prime minister Indira Gandhi,
from whom she absorbed the basics of running a household
first and then graduating to running the world's largest
democracy.
Even her bitterest critics cannot
accuse Gandhi of being power-hungry and she is known to
have done her best to dissuade her husband, who was
happy working as an airline pilot, from entering the
hurly-burly world of Indian politics.
But the
assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 by her Sikh
bodyguards and that of her son and successor in office
Rajiv in 1992 by Sri Lankan Tamil militants left the
Congress party, whose fortunes have been intertwined
with that of the Nehru-Gandhi family, nearly orphaned.
After spending seven years in mourning, Gandhi
allowed herself to be persuaded by Congress party bosses
in 1999 to assume the job of party president and
reinvigorate a party battered by the BJP and its Hindu
fundamentalist politics.
To the delight of her
party colleagues and the dismay of her political
opponents, Gandhi managed to turn the ailing party
around finally - leading it to the spectacular victory
in the just-concluded elections.
