NEW DELHI, 20 May 2004 — India’s media yesterday hailed Sonia Gandhi for her courage to ignore the anguished pleas of her Congress party leaders and turn down the post of prime minister.
Under headlines such as “Amazing Grace” and “Sonia’s last temptation”, national dailies splashed pictures of a pensive looking Gandhi sitting in a meeting of Congress party members late Tuesday when she made her announcement.
Newspaper editorials were unanimous in their praise of her.
“By choosing to ‘humbly decline’ to take up the prime minister’s post, she has played a masterstroke,” the Indian Express said.
“For one, it allows her to assume the high moral ground and signal that she was by no means enamored of power for its own sake, but power for the principles she believes in.
“She has thus neatly disarmed her political opponents of the one weapon they had hoped to use against her,” the paper said referring to threats by members of the outgoing Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) administration to boycott Sonia’s inauguration.
BJP leader Sushma Swaraj had threatened to shave her head and dress in funereal white, according to Hindu customs, to protest “foreign born” Sonia assuming the premiership.
“The BJP and those of its allies who supported this petty-minded campaign have emerged from the affair much diminished,” the paper said. The Hindu in an editorial said “enormous sympathy and respect” had been generated by Sonia’s decision to reject the post “after leading her party to a position of advantage that was least expected during the run-up to the general election.”
“It was a hard-worked victory earned through a decent, issue-based campaign that refused to respond in kind to highly personalized attacks targeting, among other things, Sonia’s foreign origin and ‘antecedents,’” it said.
“ Sonia’s stunning act of self-denial and political renunciation cannot be allowed to be seen as an endorsement of the vicious campaign that the Sushma Swarajs” had been running, the paper said.
In another piece, the political editor of the Hindu, Harish Khare, praised Sonia’s rejection of premiership as “an act of great renunciation.”
“... You have identified yourself firmly with this land’s ancient tradition of renunciation ... you have proven wrong all those critics who saw you as a power-hungry person,” wrote Khare, a self-professed critic of Sonia.
“More than that you have restored the faith of people of this country in the nobility of politics and public service,” he added.
The Hindustan Times said: “Rare is the Indian politician who turns away from power when it is offered to him or her on a platter.
“Sonia Gandhi is now the only person in Indian history to have turned down the post of prime minister not just once but twice,” it said referring to her refusal after the assassination of her husband and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide bomber in 1991.
