TIME Asia | That Gandhi Magic

	INDIA	MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8
That Gandhi Magic As Indians go to the polls, the enigmatic, Italian-born Sonia is reviving her family's sagging political party BY TIM MCGIRK New Delhi or seven years after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, his widow Sonia secluded herself inside the family's colonial-style bungalow in New Delhi at 10 Janpath. She shut out the betel nut-chew ing politicians and courtiers who pleaded with the reclusive, Italian-born Sonia to seize her dynastic inheritance and take over the ailing, 112-year-old Congress Party, which had guided India into nationhood and for most of its tumultuous life since. Whe n she kept her silence, the Indian press dubbed her "the Italian Sphinx." Her enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile was subjected to a thousand interpretations. Most of them, it turns out, were wrong. Sonia's silence exasperated Congress Party members, long accustomed to worshiping dynasty over democracy. The family Sonia married into had always led the party: first was Jawaharlal Nehru, then came his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and, finally, her son Raji v. But among most Indians, who traditionally accord renunciation of the world with far greater respect than the quest for power, Sonia's behavior as a grieving widow was seen as impeccable. Inside her shuttered bungalow, she raised a son, Rahul, and a dau ghter, Priyanka, with as much normality as could be expected from a Gandhi. To ease her grief she restored old masterpieces, a skill she learned in India. Methodical and blessed with a near-photographic memory, Sonia spent hours every day with brushes and oils, resurrecting Indian landscapes and faces from decaying canvases. Now Sonia the restorationist is trying to repair the damage done to the Nehru/Gandhi family portrait and to the Congress Party. Last December, when mid-term elections were called after the fall of the United Front coalition government, it seemed that the Congress Party was unsalvageable. Dissatisfied with the venal leadership of Sitaram Kesri, 78, many respected Congress leaders were defecting to regional parties and to the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose politics of Hindu c hauvinism were anathema to the secularism professed, if not always practiced, by the Nehru/Gandhi clan. Analysts projected that Congress was heading for oblivion, retaining fewer than 100 of the 543 contested seats in the Lok Sabha, the parliamentary lowe r house. To attract people to Kesri's wheezing speeches, party workers had to offer free meals and transportation and a few rupees for pocket money. "It was simple logic, really," says a Gandhi family friend. "Sonia knew that if she didn't act, the Congre ss Party was doomed." Now, with Sonia leading the charge, Congress may be within striking distance of heading the next coalition government. Even the BJP's leaders concede that Congress' unexpected surge under Sonia may rob them of an outright victory. Wi th nearly 600 million voters on the rolls, Indian elections are staggered over two weeks, starting Feb. 16. The winners won't be known until early March. Before Sonia decided to take an active role in the election campaign, she first had to overcome some personal misgivings. (She herself is not running for a parliamentary seat, though several polls say more than 30% of Indians want her as Prime Minister.) She is asthmatic, intensely private and unnerved by the groveling and the feet-touching with which party adulators typically greet her. She grimaces every time she is garlanded with python-sized lengths of marigolds. She is too embarrassed to watch TV cli ps of herself speaking at rallies. She also gets easily flustered by the phalanx of Black Cats, India's commando elite, who as bodyguards shadow her every move. In worse ways, too, Sonia has learned that she can expect nothing from politics but pain. When Indira was shot by her two Sikh bodyguards in 1984, it was Sonia, still wearing a housecoat, who cradled her mother-in-law's bleeding and unconscious body in th e car all the way to the hospital. Rajiv arrived a little later to find his mother dead and everyone but Sonia demanding that he be sworn in as Prime Minister. An aide of Indira's, P.C. Alexander, recalls seeing Sonia in tears, "persuading her husband not to accept the prime ministership. They were hugging each other and he was kissing her forehead and telling her, 'It's my duty. I have to do it.' Sonia said he would be killed." Her fears were prophetic. At a campaign rally in the southern town of Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991, a Sri Lankan Tamil woman first garlanded Rajiv with flowers and then triggered an explosive belted to her body, killing herself, Rajiv and more than a doz en others. As they had done earlier with Rajiv, the Congress Party tried to draft the next available Gandhi. That was widow Sonia. Sick with grief, she refused. Even her critics concede that Sonia displayed courage and political acumen in starting her campaign in Sriperumbudur, where her husband had been killed. Appearing with her head covered, in a somber sari and bereft of the vermillion mark on her forehead re served for Hindu wives with living husbands, Sonia played all the emotive chords expected of a grieving dynastic widow. Reading a speech written in both Roman and Hindi script, she told supporters gathered in the coconut groves of Sriperumbudur: "I became part of India 30 years ago when I entered Indira Gandhi's home as her eldest son's bride." She added: "I am a daughter of India. This is the country of my husband, and I will remain in India till my last breath." Many educated Indians are scandalized that in a nation of 950 million people, nobody better can be found to lead the Congress Party than an Italian-born housewife. "We fought for freedom from foreign rule, and the Congress wants to hand it back to a forei gner," complains Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh state. But this is to overlook the hold that the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty still has on the national psyche, as well as the Indian taste for melodrama. Says Rajiv Desai, a public affairs cons ultant to the Congress Party: "She is articulating a powerful message: a widow's sacrifice for her country. Her body language is one of vulnerability, but her words are a prizefighters'." Her opponents on the Hindu right at first tried to paint Sonia as a puppet of the Vatican and Rome, but that ploy was dropped as patently ludicrous. Says Balwant Singh, a farm worker in Haryana state: "Who says she's not an Indian? Once a girl leaves her village and moves to her husband's home, she belongs to her husband 's village, and not her parents' village." Sonia's odyssey from her parent's village of Orbassano, near Turin, to the national stage in Indian politics has been a strange one. Her father, Stefano Maino, owned a medium-sized construction company and was once a fervent supporter of Mussolini. Impris oned by the Soviets during World War II, Maino later named his dog Stalin and his three daughters, including Sonia, after Russian women who helped him escape from a pow camp. He insisted that Sonia learn Russian. "On several occasions, she bashed me over the head with a heavy Russian-Italian dictionary," recalls an early boyfriend, Josto Maffeo, who now lives in Madrid. "Sonia always had a fiery temper." India had never been on Sonia's schoolgirl map. In her memoirs of life with Rajiv, published in 1992, she writes: "In those days I had a vague idea that India existed somewhere in the world with its snakes, elephants and jungles." At 18, she was sent by her father to learn English at a foreign language school in Cambridge, and, she later recalled, lodged with a family who served her boiled cabbage and "gooey" spaghetti on toast. The closest thing to home cooking was a Greek restaurant where she met Rajiv, then a technical engineering student at Cambridge (he later dropped out to become a commercial airlin e pilot). She writes: "We greeted each other and, as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight." It apparently was for Rajiv, too. He wasted no time in trying to introduce her to his mother when she visited London, but Sonia says she was so "panicked" that she couldn't go through with it. On a second attempt, Sonia found Indira nearly as warm as her own Italian mother, and her fears were rapidly dispelled. Sonia's parents weren't keen on the romance. An Italian weekly, Il Venerdi, claimed that Maino tried to break off his daughter's love. "Don't even talk about this," the weekly quoted him as telling her. "Not another word about this. Better that you go to work somewhere." Rajiv, in the meantime, was toiling 10 hours a day on a building site in Britain, earning enough money to visit Sonia in Italy. Rajiv eventually won over Sonia's parents with his e arnestness, and the two were married in 1968 in New Delhi. Sonia's father has since died, and her mother seldom answers the door. As a neighbor recently confided to a reporter from the Italian news agency ansa: "After Rajiv's assassination, they live in f ear for the life of Sonia and their children, and don't talk to strangers." At the wedding, Sonia wore a pink cotton sari that Nehru himself wove during his imprisonment by the British before independence. Indira had worn the same sari for her wedding, and Sonia lived up to this symbolic gift, becoming the dutiful Indian daughter -in-law. It is a testimony to the Nehru/Gandhi family's secularism that no fuss was raised when Indira wed a Parsi or Rajiv a Catholic. In tradition-bound Indian society such interfaith marriages are a rarity. t wasn't long, though, before Sonia's loyalty to Indira was tested. Within the family, Sonia was expected to side with her mother-in-law against Maneka, the brash young wife of Sanjay, Indira's favorite son and ano inted political heir. Says writer Khushwant Singh, a family friend: "Mrs. Gandhi was very inclined to favor Sonia. There were calculated attempts to belittle Maneka." Some sources close to the Gandhis claim that during the 1975 Emergency, when Indira cens ored the press and jailed tens of thousands of suspected opponents, Rajiv and Sonia were so put off by Indira's emerging dictatorial tendencies that they considered leaving for Italy. But they didn't, and when Sanjay died in a plane crash in 1980, Rajiv a nd Sonia rallied behind Indira and, at her behest, helped to rid the troublesome Maneka from the family home. "Now Maneka's name has been dropped from royalty," says Singh. "No one hears her name as part of the dynasty." Throughout the messy family feud and afterward, as the Prime Minister's wife, Sonia exhibited the appropriate sense of decorum. In her house, she is still called Bahu-Rani, which roughly translates as "Daughter-in-law, the queen." Says Congress Party lead er and political confidante Sheila Dikshit: "Her conduct and behavior have always been so typically Indian. People believe that even if she were born in a foreign land, her karma is in India." Sonia's karma, as Indians would say, seems entwined with her mother-in-law's. Over the years she became nearly as devoted to Indira as to her husband. "It's my hunch that Sonia's coming out is an extension of her admiration for Mrs. Gandhi," says Abid Hus sain, vice-chairman of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in New Delhi. At her rallies, Sonia often copies Indira's trademark gestures, and her voice, despite the Italian accent, seems to have captured her mother-in-law's tense cadences. On the campaign platform s, where she is often dwarfed by giant cutouts of the Gandhi family, Sonia moves with Indira's aloof briskness. She pays no attention to the gushings of praise, preferring to wave from a distance at her massed supporters. During her 25,000 km campaign swi ng, she attracted crowds of more than 100,000. In places like Amethi, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, women invariably commented on Sonia's fair complexion, a much-cherished attribute among Indians that is identified with the privileged upper-castes. He r speeches are short, seldom more than 15 minutes, but she always lets fly with one or two punches. She has aimed a few at her own Congress Party, criticizing the many "shortcomings" of its current leaders. Sonia may have kept her silence in the years after Rajiv's death, but she obviously was paying attention to the political scene. She relies on a cot erie of liberal and educated friends, including scholars, artists and a few colleagues of her late husband, and does not tolerate gossip. Her intimates are protective of her, observing a kind of Italian omerta, or code of silence, about their relations wi th Sonia that adds to her mystique. Over the past month, Sonia has emerged from her shell and put her stamp firmly on Congress policy--even though it has meant facing up to some of Indira and Rajiv's past blunders. First, she apologized for Indira's decision to lay siege in 1984 to Sikh mil itants holed up in the sacred Golden Temple at Amritsar, though many Sikhs dismissed her words as a vote-getting ploy. Next, she battled with party president Kesri over the selection of candidates, ensuring that several Congress politicians were denied ti ckets because they are suspected of instigating a massacre of Sikhs in New Delhi after Indira's assassination. Rajiv, then Prime Minister, had shrugged off this butchery in which more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed, claiming that "when a giant tree falls, t he earth shakes." Her harshest attacks have been directed at the right-wing Hindu party. Until Sonia ventured out into the heat and dust of Indian electioneering, the BJP seemed to have a parliamentary majority within its grasp. Sonia may have stopped them from a clear-cut victory; her appeal is helping Congress candidates win over Muslim, women and younger voters. Many lower-caste Hindus and Muslims who had grown disenchanted with the Congress Party now appear likely to wander back from the smaller leftist and regional pa rties to which they had defected in recent years. At a rally of 80,000 supporters in Varanasi, Hinduism's most ancient and holy city, Sonia declared: "I am very upset. Hatred is being spread in this country in the name of religion. What kind of culture is this? This is not the culture that adopted me so kindly. This is not the culture that my mother-in-law and my husband sacrificed their lives to protect." Lines like that drip with the melodrama of a Hindi movie script, but from Sonia they sound convincin g. In her Bollywood-like role of avenging widow, Sonia may end up going too far. Some detractors describe her as insecure, even edgy and claim she has become obsessed with bringing Rajiv's killers to justice. "She's convinced that her husband's political riv als are responsible for his death, and she's determined to take revenge," says Arun Nehru, an estranged cousin of Rajiv's. "It's a very emotional thing for her, and she'll commit her first big blunder when she turns personal grief into a political vendett a." Evidence shows that Rajiv was murdered by a suicide bomber who belonged to the Sri Lankan separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which never forgave Rajiv for sending Indian troops to battle the Tamil rebels. For Sonia, the conspiracy extends beyond the Tigers; she blames politicians in India's Tamil Nadu state who patronized the island insurgents, as well as two former premiers, who Sonia thinks failed to provide adequate security for her husband. Even if Sonia fails to keep a BJP-led coalition from taking office, her campaign has at least saved the Congress Party from extinction, a fate that seemed inescapable just a few weeks back. By galvanizing party workers, Sonia may have turned back the anti -Congress tide in crucial states such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. And Sonia may have earned herself some breathing space. If she had shied away from politics, the few survivors left in the Congress Party would probably have abandoned her, and she w ould have become a vulnerable political target in her bungalow for a hostile BJP government. "By taking charge of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi is buying insurance," says BJP adviser T.V.R. Sheony. "She has entered politics not for the future of her party bu t for protecting the sins of her past." bove all, Sonia appears eager to protect the family legacy. That means keeping Congress from disintegrating should her son, Rahul, now 27, or her daughter, Priyanka, 26, choose to inherit the party's mantle. (Of th e two, Priyanka seems to have more flair for crowds and is often compared to her grandmother Indira.) But Sonia's interpretation of her children's legacy is broader than this: it also means upholding Nehru's dream of a secular India, one greater than its myriad faiths, languages and customs. Says a friend, designer Sunita Kohli: "Her sense of duty overrides her wish for privacy. It's not a question of her wanting to take part in politics. She sees it as an inescapable destiny." Sonia's critics argue that Congress' destiny has run its course. During the 44 years that Congress has ruled since independence, they charge, party workers have grown corrupt, indolent and prone to murderous factionalism. One recent visitor to Kesri's par ty headquarters compares it to a "Soviet-style politburo." He adds: "They do nothing but drink tea and eat ghee-filled sweets. Their only raison d'etre is survival." Right now, survival depends entirely on Sonia, who has been careful not to side openly wi th anyone in the party's byzantine intrigues. Campaign managers have pressured her to choose a candidate for Prime Minister, but she prefers to keep them guessing. Her first choice is thought to be former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. Sober and honest, Singh in 1991 ushered in India's long-awaited economic reforms, and he helped write the Congress Party's pragmatic new manifesto. Singh has credibility with foreign investors, whom India desperately needs, but the party's bare-knuckled brawlers may be to o much for the gentlemanly Sikh technocrat. The test of Sonia's mettle will come after the elections, no matter who wins. If Congress prevails, in an alliance with regional parties, Sonia will be expected to enforce a truce among the party's warring bosses and impose some coherent direction on the new government. If the BJP and its allies win, it will be up to Sonia to keep Congress intact for the next national polls. Either way, her skills as a restorationist won't be enough; she'll require artistry. The canvas will be empty for Sonia to paint the future of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty as she likes. With reporting by Greg Burke/Rome, Meenakshi Ganguly/Varanasi, Maseeh Rahman/Amethi and Jane Walker/Madrid Photograph by Robert Nickelsberg for TIME
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As Indians go to the polls, the enigmatic, Italian-born Sonia is reviving her family's sagging political party

BY TIM MCGIRK New Delhi

or seven years after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, his widow Sonia secluded herself inside the family's colonial-style bungalow in New Delhi at 10 Janpath. She shut out the betel nut-chew ing politicians and courtiers who pleaded with the reclusive, Italian-born Sonia to seize her dynastic inheritance and take over the ailing, 112-year-old Congress Party, which had guided India into nationhood and for most of its tumultuous life since. Whe n she kept her silence, the Indian press dubbed her "the Italian Sphinx." Her enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile was subjected to a thousand interpretations. Most of them, it turns out, were wrong.

Sonia's silence exasperated Congress Party members, long accustomed to worshiping dynasty over democracy. The family Sonia married into had always led the party: first was Jawaharlal Nehru, then came his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and, finally, her son Raji v. But among most Indians, who traditionally accord renunciation of the world with far greater respect than the quest for power, Sonia's behavior as a grieving widow was seen as impeccable. Inside her shuttered bungalow, she raised a son, Rahul, and a dau ghter, Priyanka, with as much normality as could be expected from a Gandhi. To ease her grief she restored old masterpieces, a skill she learned in India. Methodical and blessed with a near-photographic memory, Sonia spent hours every day with brushes and oils, resurrecting Indian landscapes and faces from decaying canvases.

Now Sonia the restorationist is trying to repair the damage done to the Nehru/Gandhi family portrait and to the Congress Party. Last December, when mid-term elections were called after the fall of the United Front coalition government, it seemed that the Congress Party was unsalvageable. Dissatisfied with the venal leadership of Sitaram Kesri, 78, many respected Congress leaders were defecting to regional parties and to the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose politics of Hindu c hauvinism were anathema to the secularism professed, if not always practiced, by the Nehru/Gandhi clan. Analysts projected that Congress was heading for oblivion, retaining fewer than 100 of the 543 contested seats in the Lok Sabha, the parliamentary lowe r house. To attract people to Kesri's wheezing speeches, party workers had to offer free meals and transportation and a few rupees for pocket money. "It was simple logic, really," says a Gandhi family friend. "Sonia knew that if she didn't act, the Congre ss Party was doomed." Now, with Sonia leading the charge, Congress may be within striking distance of heading the next coalition government. Even the BJP's leaders concede that Congress' unexpected surge under Sonia may rob them of an outright victory. Wi th nearly 600 million voters on the rolls, Indian elections are staggered over two weeks, starting Feb. 16. The winners won't be known until early March.

Before Sonia decided to take an active role in the election campaign, she first had to overcome some personal misgivings. (She herself is not running for a parliamentary seat, though several polls say more than 30% of Indians want her as Prime Minister.) She is asthmatic, intensely private and unnerved by the groveling and the feet-touching with which party adulators typically greet her. She grimaces every time she is garlanded with python-sized lengths of marigolds. She is too embarrassed to watch TV cli ps of herself speaking at rallies. She also gets easily flustered by the phalanx of Black Cats, India's commando elite, who as bodyguards shadow her every move.

In worse ways, too, Sonia has learned that she can expect nothing from politics but pain. When Indira was shot by her two Sikh bodyguards in 1984, it was Sonia, still wearing a housecoat, who cradled her mother-in-law's bleeding and unconscious body in th e car all the way to the hospital. Rajiv arrived a little later to find his mother dead and everyone but Sonia demanding that he be sworn in as Prime Minister. An aide of Indira's, P.C. Alexander, recalls seeing Sonia in tears, "persuading her husband not to accept the prime ministership. They were hugging each other and he was kissing her forehead and telling her, 'It's my duty. I have to do it.' Sonia said he would be killed."

Her fears were prophetic. At a campaign rally in the southern town of Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991, a Sri Lankan Tamil woman first garlanded Rajiv with flowers and then triggered an explosive belted to her body, killing herself, Rajiv and more than a doz en others. As they had done earlier with Rajiv, the Congress Party tried to draft the next available Gandhi. That was widow Sonia. Sick with grief, she refused.

Even her critics concede that Sonia displayed courage and political acumen in starting her campaign in Sriperumbudur, where her husband had been killed. Appearing with her head covered, in a somber sari and bereft of the vermillion mark on her forehead re served for Hindu wives with living husbands, Sonia played all the emotive chords expected of a grieving dynastic widow. Reading a speech written in both Roman and Hindi script, she told supporters gathered in the coconut groves of Sriperumbudur: "I became part of India 30 years ago when I entered Indira Gandhi's home as her eldest son's bride." She added: "I am a daughter of India. This is the country of my husband, and I will remain in India till my last breath."

Many educated Indians are scandalized that in a nation of 950 million people, nobody better can be found to lead the Congress Party than an Italian-born housewife. "We fought for freedom from foreign rule, and the Congress wants to hand it back to a forei gner," complains Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh state. But this is to overlook the hold that the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty still has on the national psyche, as well as the Indian taste for melodrama. Says Rajiv Desai, a public affairs cons ultant to the Congress Party: "She is articulating a powerful message: a widow's sacrifice for her country. Her body language is one of vulnerability, but her words are a prizefighters'." Her opponents on the Hindu right at first tried to paint Sonia as a puppet of the Vatican and Rome, but that ploy was dropped as patently ludicrous. Says Balwant Singh, a farm worker in Haryana state: "Who says she's not an Indian? Once a girl leaves her village and moves to her husband's home, she belongs to her husband 's village, and not her parents' village."

Sonia's odyssey from her parent's village of Orbassano, near Turin, to the national stage in Indian politics has been a strange one. Her father, Stefano Maino, owned a medium-sized construction company and was once a fervent supporter of Mussolini. Impris oned by the Soviets during World War II, Maino later named his dog Stalin and his three daughters, including Sonia, after Russian women who helped him escape from a pow camp. He insisted that Sonia learn Russian. "On several occasions, she bashed me over the head with a heavy Russian-Italian dictionary," recalls an early boyfriend, Josto Maffeo, who now lives in Madrid. "Sonia always had a fiery temper." India had never been on Sonia's schoolgirl map. In her memoirs of life with Rajiv, published in 1992, she writes: "In those days I had a vague idea that India existed somewhere in the world with its snakes, elephants and jungles." At 18, she was sent by her father to learn English at a foreign language school in Cambridge, and, she later recalled, lodged with a family who served her boiled cabbage and "gooey" spaghetti on toast. The closest thing to home cooking was a Greek restaurant where she met Rajiv, then a technical engineering student at Cambridge (he later dropped out to become a commercial airlin e pilot). She writes: "We greeted each other and, as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight."

It apparently was for Rajiv, too. He wasted no time in trying to introduce her to his mother when she visited London, but Sonia says she was so "panicked" that she couldn't go through with it. On a second attempt, Sonia found Indira nearly as warm as her own Italian mother, and her fears were rapidly dispelled. Sonia's parents weren't keen on the romance. An Italian weekly, Il Venerdi, claimed that Maino tried to break off his daughter's love. "Don't even talk about this," the weekly quoted him as telling her. "Not another word about this. Better that you go to work somewhere." Rajiv, in the meantime, was toiling 10 hours a day on a building site in Britain, earning enough money to visit Sonia in Italy. Rajiv eventually won over Sonia's parents with his e arnestness, and the two were married in 1968 in New Delhi. Sonia's father has since died, and her mother seldom answers the door. As a neighbor recently confided to a reporter from the Italian news agency ansa: "After Rajiv's assassination, they live in f ear for the life of Sonia and their children, and don't talk to strangers."

At the wedding, Sonia wore a pink cotton sari that Nehru himself wove during his imprisonment by the British before independence. Indira had worn the same sari for her wedding, and Sonia lived up to this symbolic gift, becoming the dutiful Indian daughter -in-law. It is a testimony to the Nehru/Gandhi family's secularism that no fuss was raised when Indira wed a Parsi or Rajiv a Catholic. In tradition-bound Indian society such interfaith marriages are a rarity.

t wasn't long, though, before Sonia's loyalty to Indira was tested. Within the family, Sonia was expected to side with her mother-in-law against Maneka, the brash young wife of Sanjay, Indira's favorite son and ano inted political heir. Says writer Khushwant Singh, a family friend: "Mrs. Gandhi was very inclined to favor Sonia. There were calculated attempts to belittle Maneka." Some sources close to the Gandhis claim that during the 1975 Emergency, when Indira cens ored the press and jailed tens of thousands of suspected opponents, Rajiv and Sonia were so put off by Indira's emerging dictatorial tendencies that they considered leaving for Italy. But they didn't, and when Sanjay died in a plane crash in 1980, Rajiv a nd Sonia rallied behind Indira and, at her behest, helped to rid the troublesome Maneka from the family home. "Now Maneka's name has been dropped from royalty," says Singh. "No one hears her name as part of the dynasty."

Throughout the messy family feud and afterward, as the Prime Minister's wife, Sonia exhibited the appropriate sense of decorum. In her house, she is still called Bahu-Rani, which roughly translates as "Daughter-in-law, the queen." Says Congress Party lead er and political confidante Sheila Dikshit: "Her conduct and behavior have always been so typically Indian. People believe that even if she were born in a foreign land, her karma is in India."

Sonia's karma, as Indians would say, seems entwined with her mother-in-law's. Over the years she became nearly as devoted to Indira as to her husband. "It's my hunch that Sonia's coming out is an extension of her admiration for Mrs. Gandhi," says Abid Hus sain, vice-chairman of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in New Delhi. At her rallies, Sonia often copies Indira's trademark gestures, and her voice, despite the Italian accent, seems to have captured her mother-in-law's tense cadences. On the campaign platform s, where she is often dwarfed by giant cutouts of the Gandhi family, Sonia moves with Indira's aloof briskness. She pays no attention to the gushings of praise, preferring to wave from a distance at her massed supporters. During her 25,000 km campaign swi ng, she attracted crowds of more than 100,000. In places like Amethi, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, women invariably commented on Sonia's fair complexion, a much-cherished attribute among Indians that is identified with the privileged upper-castes. He r speeches are short, seldom more than 15 minutes, but she always lets fly with one or two punches.

She has aimed a few at her own Congress Party, criticizing the many "shortcomings" of its current leaders. Sonia may have kept her silence in the years after Rajiv's death, but she obviously was paying attention to the political scene. She relies on a cot erie of liberal and educated friends, including scholars, artists and a few colleagues of her late husband, and does not tolerate gossip. Her intimates are protective of her, observing a kind of Italian omerta, or code of silence, about their relations wi th Sonia that adds to her mystique.

Over the past month, Sonia has emerged from her shell and put her stamp firmly on Congress policy--even though it has meant facing up to some of Indira and Rajiv's past blunders. First, she apologized for Indira's decision to lay siege in 1984 to Sikh mil itants holed up in the sacred Golden Temple at Amritsar, though many Sikhs dismissed her words as a vote-getting ploy. Next, she battled with party president Kesri over the selection of candidates, ensuring that several Congress politicians were denied ti ckets because they are suspected of instigating a massacre of Sikhs in New Delhi after Indira's assassination. Rajiv, then Prime Minister, had shrugged off this butchery in which more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed, claiming that "when a giant tree falls, t he earth shakes."

Her harshest attacks have been directed at the right-wing Hindu party. Until Sonia ventured out into the heat and dust of Indian electioneering, the BJP seemed to have a parliamentary majority within its grasp. Sonia may have stopped them from a clear-cut victory; her appeal is helping Congress candidates win over Muslim, women and younger voters. Many lower-caste Hindus and Muslims who had grown disenchanted with the Congress Party now appear likely to wander back from the smaller leftist and regional pa rties to which they had defected in recent years. At a rally of 80,000 supporters in Varanasi, Hinduism's most ancient and holy city, Sonia declared: "I am very upset. Hatred is being spread in this country in the name of religion. What kind of culture is this? This is not the culture that adopted me so kindly. This is not the culture that my mother-in-law and my husband sacrificed their lives to protect." Lines like that drip with the melodrama of a Hindi movie script, but from Sonia they sound convincin g.

In her Bollywood-like role of avenging widow, Sonia may end up going too far. Some detractors describe her as insecure, even edgy and claim she has become obsessed with bringing Rajiv's killers to justice. "She's convinced that her husband's political riv als are responsible for his death, and she's determined to take revenge," says Arun Nehru, an estranged cousin of Rajiv's. "It's a very emotional thing for her, and she'll commit her first big blunder when she turns personal grief into a political vendett a." Evidence shows that Rajiv was murdered by a suicide bomber who belonged to the Sri Lankan separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which never forgave Rajiv for sending Indian troops to battle the Tamil rebels. For Sonia, the conspiracy extends beyond the Tigers; she blames politicians in India's Tamil Nadu state who patronized the island insurgents, as well as two former premiers, who Sonia thinks failed to provide adequate security for her husband.

Even if Sonia fails to keep a BJP-led coalition from taking office, her campaign has at least saved the Congress Party from extinction, a fate that seemed inescapable just a few weeks back. By galvanizing party workers, Sonia may have turned back the anti -Congress tide in crucial states such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. And Sonia may have earned herself some breathing space. If she had shied away from politics, the few survivors left in the Congress Party would probably have abandoned her, and she w ould have become a vulnerable political target in her bungalow for a hostile BJP government. "By taking charge of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi is buying insurance," says BJP adviser T.V.R. Sheony. "She has entered politics not for the future of her party bu t for protecting the sins of her past."

bove all, Sonia appears eager to protect the family legacy. That means keeping Congress from disintegrating should her son, Rahul, now 27, or her daughter, Priyanka, 26, choose to inherit the party's mantle. (Of th e two, Priyanka seems to have more flair for crowds and is often compared to her grandmother Indira.) But Sonia's interpretation of her children's legacy is broader than this: it also means upholding Nehru's dream of a secular India, one greater than its myriad faiths, languages and customs. Says a friend, designer Sunita Kohli: "Her sense of duty overrides her wish for privacy. It's not a question of her wanting to take part in politics. She sees it as an inescapable destiny."

Sonia's critics argue that Congress' destiny has run its course. During the 44 years that Congress has ruled since independence, they charge, party workers have grown corrupt, indolent and prone to murderous factionalism. One recent visitor to Kesri's par ty headquarters compares it to a "Soviet-style politburo." He adds: "They do nothing but drink tea and eat ghee-filled sweets. Their only raison d'etre is survival." Right now, survival depends entirely on Sonia, who has been careful not to side openly wi th anyone in the party's byzantine intrigues. Campaign managers have pressured her to choose a candidate for Prime Minister, but she prefers to keep them guessing. Her first choice is thought to be former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. Sober and honest, Singh in 1991 ushered in India's long-awaited economic reforms, and he helped write the Congress Party's pragmatic new manifesto. Singh has credibility with foreign investors, whom India desperately needs, but the party's bare-knuckled brawlers may be to o much for the gentlemanly Sikh technocrat.

The test of Sonia's mettle will come after the elections, no matter who wins. If Congress prevails, in an alliance with regional parties, Sonia will be expected to enforce a truce among the party's warring bosses and impose some coherent direction on the new government. If the BJP and its allies win, it will be up to Sonia to keep Congress intact for the next national polls. Either way, her skills as a restorationist won't be enough; she'll require artistry. The canvas will be empty for Sonia to paint the future of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty as she likes.

With reporting by Greg Burke/Rome, Meenakshi Ganguly/Varanasi, Maseeh Rahman/Amethi and Jane Walker/Madrid

Photograph by Robert Nickelsberg for TIME