Sonia Gandhi is the longest-serving president of the Congress party, which has governed India during most of its post-Independence decades. She was born in Italy, and educated at Cambridge University, where she met Rajiv Gandhi, who was then the son of prime minister Indira Gandhi. The two married in 1968.
After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, during campaigning for that year’s general elections, Sonia Gandhi initially stayed away from politics, but in 1998, she was chosen as the president of the Congress party. Under her leadership, in 2004, a Congress-led coalition came to power at the Centre. She famously declined to be prime minister — her foreign birth had become a politically controversial issue — and instead chose the economist Manmohan Singh. She was then named the chairperson of the coalition, which was called the United Progressive Alliance or the UPA.
Sonia Gandhi won her first Lok Sabha election in 1999, representing Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, a family stronghold. From 2004, she has represented Rae Bareli as an MP in the Lok Sabha. In 2024, she announced she was contesting elections from the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly elected house of Parliament, signalling her stepping back from electoral politics.
It is she, who thinks Modi is an usurper who has somehow ‘managed’ to become PM. and is occupying a chair that is rightfully and divinely ordained to be Rahul’s. She should shed her hatred and contempt towards Modi. Her family thinks that THEY alone are supreme. The Congress party is obsequious to them..
Nobody understands Mahatma Gandhi’s sacrifice these days. The latest sacrifice known to people was of a different Gandhi, for grabbing the remote. The difference between the two sacrificing Gandhis is one of them is on bail