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| Wednesday, 24 March 2004 |
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Nehru-Gandhi dynasty keeps India guessing NEW DELHI, Tuesday (AFP) India's charismatic Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, now in opposition after ruling the country for more than four decades, kept the nation guessing Monday over the possible entry of slain former premier Rajiv Gandhi's daughter into the electoral fray. Gandhi's Italian-born widow Sonia, who now leads India's main opposition Congress party, said an announcement would be made only if or when her 32-year-old daughter, Priyanka, decides to contest upcoming elections. The comments came a day after the Congress president's 33-year-old son, Rahul, announced his plans to contest the elections to parliament's 545-seat lower house, scheduled to begin from April 20. "It is for them to take a decision. Rahul took a decision to contest the elections and when and if Priyanka takes a decision it will be told to you," Gandhi said of her daughter, who is now campaigning for Congress, the party of her great-grandfather and India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The 119-year-old Congress, striving to oust India's ruling Hindu nationalists in the polls, have launched a mammoth advertising campaign which depicts Rahul as the reincarnation of his father and Priyanka as the political inheritor of her grandmother, Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984. The 57-year-old Sonia on Monday rejected the tag of "heir apparent" accorded to Rahul and Priyanka and said the choice whether to take over the political reins of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has dominated Congress since it began its political journey in 1885, would be left to the siblings. "There in nothing like an heir apparent! They are individuals and they will make their own choices, decisions," said Gandhi on the sidelines of the party's launch of its electoral manifesto for the upcoming ballot. On Sunday Rahul, a financial consultant, took a full-time plunge into politics, with Congress announcing he will contest the dynasty's home borough of Amethi, which returned his father to parliament three times - in 1984, 1989 and 1991, the year he was blown up by a female suicide bomber. Sonia Gandhi also won easily from the constituency in general elections in 1999. Rajiv's younger brother, Sanjay, was also returned to parliament from Amethi in 1980, the same year he was killed in an air crash. Sonia will now shift to the federal seat of Rae Bareilly, another traditional bastion of India's most famous political family which sent Indira Gandhi to parliament on more than one occasion. |
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