Amma Mia! Does the woman in this picture look Italian to you? Robert Nickelsberg for TIME

I should have known to take my phone off the hook last week when it began to look likely that Sonia Gandhi would become India's next prime minister. Sure enough, I was inundated by calls from Indian friends and acquaintances, some expressing disgust, others dismay. A few talked of giving up their citizenship, and at least one threatened to flush his passport down the toilet. All this because the lady was born, 52 years ago and 6,000 km away from New Delhi, as Sonia Maino.

Vinay, a business manager from Bombay, shed his normally cool demeanor when the subject came up over lunch. "One billion people to choose from," he said, spitting out each syllable with clear distaste, "and we could only come up with an Italian to run the show?" Sonia has been an Indian citizen for 15 years, but that's not good enough for Vinay. He pointed out that many countries don't allow naturalized citizens to assume high office. The United States, for instance, insists that its presidents be born on American soil. India's written constitution doesn't make such demands. Its authors, in the first flush of independence, obviously didn't believe this would ever be an issue. "And, look at the mess they landed us in," said Vinay, his voice rising several decibels.

Others have been cloaking their consternation in black humor. In chatrooms and e-mail chains, the Sonia jokes range from sarcastic to scatological. India would soon go "from Ram rule to Rome rule," said one punster, in a sly reference to the Hindu god who serves as a political talisman for the Bharatiya Janata Party of departing Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Another wiseguy warned that Bombay's film factories would be required to produce "Spaghetti Easterns." There were more personal cracks, many of them about Sonia's heavily accented Hindi--never mind that one recent Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, didn't speak the national language at all. As is often the case with online humor, most of the Sonia jokes are banal, juvenile. But they also touch some raw nerves. One pained recipient hit the Reply All key and wrote, "We should be crying, not laughing."

I'll do neither. These expressions of anguish, the heartfelt and the hyperbolic, are misplaced. That Sonia was born in the village of Orbassano, near Turin, is irrelevant to her political pedigree. On the contrary, in the eyes of her Congress Party workers she represents something uniquely Indian: the haloed Nehru-Gandhi family. She is Indira's daughter-in-law, Rajiv's widow, the mother of Jawaharlal's great-grandchildren. Italian? It wouldn't matter if she came from that new solar system scientists just discovered.

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