260 Indian Videshinis
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hirty-six momentous years of Indian history separate the 1968 and the 2004 quotations above by Sonia Gandhi, our next Indian videshini. The earlier statement marks her entry into public life and the second her renunciation of the post of prime minister of India. Among many other difficult periods for India, the years between 1968 and 2004 encompass the Indo-Pak War of 1971, the Kargil War, the Emergency and the Kashmir Insurgency. We have entered the political arena of a sovereign nation state and the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty was at the helm of the country for nineteen of those thirty-six years.1 Those unstable years for India did witness some happy events for the Nehru–Gandhi family itself, events that pointed towards its continued central role in Indian life. These included the marriage of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi in 1968; the births of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi (in 1970 and 1972 respectively); the marriage of Sanjay and Maneka Gandhi in 1974; and the birth of their son Varun in 1980.2 The ‘business’ of the dynasty is politics, however, and two political defeats in national elections impinged on the family’s dominance in the post-Independence period: Indira Gandhi lost in 1977, and her son Rajiv in 1989, and to this we can add the defeat of Sonia and her son Rahul in 2014. However, even more than these political setbacks, which might always be reversed, the dynasty was shaken to its very core by no less than three deaths from unnatural causes during this period. Sanjay Gandhi, the dynasty’s heir apparent, met with an accidental death in an aeroplane crash in 1980; Indira Gandhi died at the hands of her bodyguards Beant and Satwant Singh in 1984; and Rajiv was killed by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber Thenmozhi Rajaratnam in 1991. These three interrupted Nehru–Gandhi lives may have potentially negated the family’s ability to be active in national politics at the highest level, but one after the other they propelled Sonia Gandhi from the periphery of the dynasty to its very centre.3 The final killing in 1991 meant that her small family unit had been decapitated, her children deprived of a father and she of a husband; the question then arose of what role she could play in the party now that she was no longer the wife of its head. Between the early 1980s (when she, Rajiv and their children returned to India after the end of the Emergency and after the