Defiant Gandhi Assumes Top Spot in Party

NEW DELHI —  Assuming the leadership of India’s Congress Party for a second time, Sonia Gandhi electrified an audience of party loyalists Tuesday as she condemned her political rivals.

Heir to the Indian dynasty that produced three prime ministers, the Italian-born Gandhi railed against critics who had questioned her fitness to lead the country because of her foreign birth.

“India accepted me 31 years ago, the day I came here as Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law,” she told nearly 1,400 cheering party delegates.

“I got married here, became a mother here and became a widow before your eyes,” she said in Hindi, referring to the 1991 assassination of her husband, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

“Every drop of my blood belongs to this country,” she said.

Gandhi’s critics included three top leaders of her own party, who were ejected from the party after saying she should not be prime minister because she was not a natural-born Indian.

She accused the three of leading “a campaign of calumny and sowing the seeds of suspicion among people on the question of her loyalty to the country.”

Party delegates on Tuesday adopted a resolution calling Gandhi their “unquestioned leader.” The resolution also said the controversy over Gandhi’s foreign origin was a non-issue.

“It negates the Indian Constitution we swear by,” it said. Indian laws do not discriminate against naturalized citizens.

Since the collapse of India’s government last month, Congress has been preparing for elections in September it hopes will restore the party to leadership after three years in the political wilderness.

With no other figure of Gandhi’s stature to unite them and public sympathy building for their major opponent, caretaker Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Congress Party officials organized mass demonstrations across the country. Thousands of supporters thronged party offices in New Delhi and state capitals all week, begging “Soniaji” to come back after she resigned her post early last week.

Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party called the resignation a sham, aimed at drumming up support for her leadership.

“What began as a tragicomedy for the Congress Party has ended as a farce,” BJP spokesman Arun Jaitley told reporters.

It seems almost certain that the BJP and its allies will continue to raise questions about her loyalty.

She has refused to discuss how she used an Italian passport recently to travel abroad, for example, and why she waited 15 years after immigrating to become an Indian citizen.

After Gandhi’s speech, several party officials predicted victory at the polls, saying Gandhi had put the issue of her nationality to rest.

Political analysts said it would be better for Gandhi to lead Congress, rather than aim at becoming prime minister, to avoid dividing the country on a sensitive issue.

“As the Congress president, she will guide the prime minister, if and when the party wins,” wrote political commentator Kuldip Nayar in the Indian Express. “Any other course may polarize the country.”