Nehru-Gandhi dynasty revived with defeat of Hindu hard-liners

NEW DELHI -- After all the pundits had written off the family dynasty that dates back to the birth of modern India, the legendary Nehru-Gandhi clan has captured the kingdom once again.

And its matriarch, Sonia Gandhi, is likely this week to become India's first foreign-born prime minister, further burnishing the family name.

"I feel deeply humbled," Gandhi told fellow Congress party lawmakers after they elected her their Parliament leader Saturday in a major step toward making the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi the next leader of the world's largest democracy.

"I stand here today, in the space once occupied by my great teachers," she said, naming India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and her late husband.

"I would like to remember them today. I would like to honor them."

An aura of service

Her charming and charismatic children, Rahul and Priyanka, also have secured a place in history for the family's fifth generation. He was elected to Parliament on Thursday and his younger sister is likely to follow once her toddlers are packed off to school.

"With the entry of the children, suddenly it gives the Congress party a 25-year horizon," said Rajiv Desai, a close family friend and Mrs. Gandhi's media adviser. "Suddenly, the Congress is thinking: 'Wait a second, here's this old guy who's 80 and doddering with steel knees, and look at us -- the future is ours."'

That doddering old guy is caretaker prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who resigned Thursday after Gandhi's Congress party unexpectedly devastated his ruling alliance in Parliament elections last week.

The 79-year-old, lifelong politician with knee replacements belongs to an old guard who attacked the 57-year-old Gandhi's Italian origins and claimed her children were coasting on the family name.

Commoners and kings

Millions of Indians, particularly those out in the villages untouched by Vajpayee's "India Shining" economic boom, thought differently. Like the Kennedys in the United States, the Gandhis have tried to maintain an aura of service and sacrifice for their country.

"During my travels with Rajiv to the remotest and poorest parts of India, I experienced the depth of feeling people had for him, how much he cared for them and the extent to which their love energized him," Sonia Gandhi wrote in her 1992 book, a pictorial tribute to her husband.

She said Rajiv cared as much for commoners as he did for kings, regardless of caste or religion.

"He was an Indian and everyone saw him as their own."

Their 33-year-daughter, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and 34-year-old son, Rahul -- children of a prime minister, grandchildren of another and great-grandchildren of the political architect of modern India -- also have revived hope among the disenfranchised that someone who has the power to make a difference will actually attempt to do so.

"There has been no single family that has lived their lives for this abstract thing called the nation," Desai said. "I think what they represent is sacrifice. That's their charisma and their enigma."

Several farmers in the village of Khatiwas, in the northern state of Haryana, said they voted Congress because life was better when the Gandhis were in power. There was a sense then that the government was working to improve the lives not just of the urban middle class.

"It's because of their work that we love them -- not because of their name," said Rao Amar Singh, sitting in the shade of a tree, taking a break from working the mustard and wheat fields under the summer sun.

"The local villages all love these people. Not much good has happened here since the Gandhis left power," added fellow farmer Nathu Ram.

Not everyone worships the Nehru-Gandhi clan. Hindu nationalists abhor them and campaigned on a pledge to amend the constitution to prohibit foreign-born Indian citizens from holding office.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi jailed thousands of her opponents, including Vajpayee, during her bizarre crackdown on civil liberties from 1975 to 1977. Critics say India fell deeper into poverty and corruption under the Congress party, which ruled from 1947, when the country won its independence from Britain, until 1996.

But the magic of the Gandhi name is not hurt by both young Gandhis being attractive -- with their mother's dimples and father's penetrating eyes -- and hip enough to spark curiosity among the apathetic Generation X.

Photogenic Priyanka sports a short haircut and flashes coy smiles as she gives pithy sound bites on behalf of her evasive mother. The fiercely private Rahul, Harvard-educated with a Colombian girlfriend, blossomed into an outspoken and charismatic speaker on the campaign trail.

He stunned his bodyguards Saturday, two days after his mother's victory, by climbing over the barricades in front of their New Delhi home and leaping into the crowd to shake hands with supporters.

"I will never forget this moment," gushed Satish Kumar, 32, a candy seller who had elbowed his way to Rahul. "This is just the beginning. He will be prime minister one day."

Like the Kennedys, the Gandhis have suffered tragedy and turmoil.

Rajiv was killed by a Sri Lankan suicide bomber in 1991. He was the son of Indira Gandhi, assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

Indira, in turn, was the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, who ruled India for 17 years after independence. The family is unrelated, but was closely tied to the country's most famous Gandhi, independence leader Mohandas. He, too, was assassinated, by a Hindu fanatic who resented his overtures to Muslims.

At the Indira Gandhi Museum, Rajiv's bloodstained sneakers and the bloodied pumpkin-colored sari Indira was wearing the day of her assassination are on display. Indira's younger son, Sanjay, was killed in a freak airplane crash in 1980, leaving behind his wife, Maneka, and their son, Varun.

Sonia Gandhi once said she feared for her husband's life and, after his assassination, resented that her children became "virtual prisoners" in their home for several years, isolated and educated by tutors.

"I understood Rajiv's duty to her," she wrote of his becoming prime minister after Indira's death. "At the same time I was angry and resentful towards a system which, as I saw it, demanded him as a sacrificial lamb. It would crush him and destroy him -- of that I was absolutely certain."

Sonia Gandhi today is heavily guarded and cautious in crowds. Why put herself and her children through the anxiety of potential danger?

Because Rajiv would have wanted her to, Desai said.

"The fact that her mother-in-law and her husband both were killed because of politics, she is now even more convinced that she needs to preserve their memory."