May 18, 2004

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Top Job? No Thanks

This is off the hooks. The New York Times’ Amy Waldman reports that Sonia Gandhi is going to turn down the prime ministership in India, where her party recently kicked butt in elections. Explanation:

Rajiv Desai, a longtime adviser to the Gandhi family, said Mrs. Gandhi had never wanted to be prime minister. Rather, she had wanted to revive the Congress party and defeat the Hindu nationalists, whom she saw as a threat to India’s secular identity as it had been defined by her husband’s grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru.

On Monday night, she told senior party members and allies that she did not want to be prime minister, but had been pressured to change her mind, Mr. Desai said. Today she changed it back.

“She was pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed — now it’s come to shove and she’s saying no thanks,” Mr. Desai said. Her act, he said, was “almost Mahatma Gandhian in scope — the idea of renunciation — the idea of spurning power when you have it in your grasp.”

(Sonia Gandhi is no relation to Mohandas, by the way.)

She’s supporting a former finance minister for the top job.

South Asian politics is intense, though:

Before her announcement in Parliament, hundreds of party members flocked to her home at 10 Janpath to try to persuade her to change her mind, signing letters to her in blood and threatening to commit suicide.

Yow. Even Bill Clinton doesn’t get that here.