NEW DELHI, 23 February 2004 - Italian-born opposition leader and Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi says she is "completely Indian" - and that the governing party is using her foreign origins as an election issue because it hasn't achieved anything.
"They have so totally failed that they have to pick up this one issue," Sonia said on the New Delhi Television channel, which aired excerpts of the interview yesterday.
Sonia, who rarely speaks to media, said in the television interview that her party was no longer projecting her as the opposition's prime ministerial candidate.
She said her top priority was to oust the Vajpayee government in the coming elections by forming an alliance of secular parties, and that the issue of a prime minister for an alternative government should be discussed only after the elections.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party has said Sonia's overseas origin will be a main campaign issue during the April-May parliamentary elections.
Sonia, the widow of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, said her foreign birth might work against her with some voters, particularly in urban areas. But she said that in rural areas - especially among women and poor people - she never felt she was a foreigner. "Because I am not. I am Indian," she said.
Sonia usually wears hand-woven cotton saris and is fluent in Hindi, India's national language. Like many traditional women, she covers her head while touring the countryside or speaking at political rallies.
She said she doesn't really resent being called a foreigner.
"In fact, it makes me laugh," she said. "When I go abroad I feel like a foreigner there."
Sonia's supporters say she is India's daughter-in-law, having married into the country's most famous family, the Nehru-Gandhi clan.
Sonia was born Sonia Maino in 1946 near Turin, Italy. In 1968, she married Rajiv Gandhi - whose mother Indira Gandhi and grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru ruled the country for more than three decades following India's independence from Britain in 1947.
She has lived in this country since her marriage, and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She hesitantly entered politics after suicide bombers killed her husband in 1991, and took charge of the Congress party in 1998.
"After all, marrying into this sort of a family, which was part of the freedom movement, sacrificed for the country ... and had no life outside politics, you also assimilate and imbibe certain amount of these feelings," she said.
Sonia has been crisscrossing the country in a campaign to return Congress to power at the center.
Indian law doesn't bar foreign-born people from the nation's top political post, but some opposition parties have also expressed reservations about Sonia's origin.
