NEW DELHI, 16 May 2004 — India’s charismatic Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is back in focus after Sonia Gandhi led her Congress party to a stunning electoral victory and son Rahul won a seat in Parliament by a huge margin.

But the Gandhis are not the only ones with a deep-seated belief that politics is a family affair — sons and spouses of many other political figures caught the eyes of the voters in marathon elections that ended Monday.

At 27, Milind Deora was the youngest to win a seat, on a Congress ticket in Bombay — and he did so with a more handsome margin than that posted by his father Murli Deora, a three-time MP.

Industrialist Murli Deora also had reason to be happy as his US-educated son routed Cabinet minister Jaywantiben Mehta, a formidable foe from the ousted Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

“The credit goes to my father,” gushed Milind Deora in a distinctly Western accent after grabbing 131,613 votes in the Bombay elections which he was tipped to lose.

Rahul Gandhi, 33, meanwhile, bettered the performance of his father, slain former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, crushing his closest rival by a staggering margin of 300,500 votes from the family seat of Amethi, while his mother, 57, picked up the adjoining borough of Rae Barelli.

“My mother is my hero. She has won the elections. She has suffered a lot and the country has reciprocated,” said Rahul, a financial consultant-turned-politician.

Joyitarditya Scindia held up the royal lineage of his MP father Madhavrao Scindia, killed in an air crash, by grabbing for Congress the hotly contested Guna seat in central India for the second time by a margin of 85,000 votes.

Not to be left out, Sachin Pilot, son of Congress leader Rajesh Pilot, won the desert constituency of Dausa, which originally his mother wanted to contest in memory of her husband, who died in a car crash.

Sachin bettered his father’s record when he pocketed 369,935 votes, defeating his closest rival by a margin of 114,865 ballots.

“Dynasties mesmerize us Indians and on top of that there is a sympathy factor for children of politicians who have died,” Delhi University’s political commentator Anand Ojha said.

Outgoing Finance Minister Jaswant Singh found solace in the victory of his son, Manvendra Singh, from the BJP seat of Barmer on Pakistan’s borders.

Manvendra, a former defense correspondent, will now occupy Parliament’s elected lower house but his father will offer guidance from the upper Rajya Sabha to which he has been nominated for five years.

Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, chief minister of Indian Kashmir, has never sat in the lower house and he could not hold back tears of joy when his firebrand daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, easily pocketed the Himalayan region’s Anantnag constituency.

Akhilesh Yadav added one more to the 35 MPs his father Mulayam Singh Yadav’s regional Samajwadi Party sent to Parliament when the young man grabbed 464,367 votes and packed his case to occupy an MP’s bungalow in New Delhi.

“Without my father’s blessings I would not have been here,” the 29-year-old Akhilesh said.

Pollsters gave the thumbs down to Sandeep Dikshit but electoral pundits did not take into account the appeal of mother Sheila Dikshit, New Delhi chief minister.

Sandeep picked up 669,527 votes, the highest of all candidates in this election, and said the ballot was a homage to his doughty mother who earned the sobriquet “Aunty No. 1” for turning New Delhi into a modern city of swanky shopping malls, multi-plexes and a metro imported from South Korea.