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.
This article is wrongly written, without fact checking, in so many ways. In 2002, the attorney general sorabjee refused extradition, not the court. The court does not say more than X rupees spent on extradition, therefore useless.
…Agusta …
Watching today’s Cut the Clutter, where India has recovered the amount paid by it to Augusta in full, an extra something plus three choppers for free, brought back memories of a joke our grandmother used to tell us. She was from Mianwali, Pakistan, where the stereotype was of Muslims being poor and industrious, the Hindus savvy businessmen. 2. A woman gave her son a one anna coin, to buy half an anna’s cooking oil. He went to the shop, where the oil was poured into his container and he was returned half an anna in change. The shopkeeper inadvertently dropped the one anna coin into the oil. When the child returned home and gave his mother the change, as she poured out the oil, she found her original one anna coin. Wow, she said, look how clever these Hindu businessmen are, I don’t know how they do it, but he has still made a profit …