Triumph of Will Sonia Gandhi

This book is a political story. It is not a conventional biography. It is a narrative about Sonia Gandhi the politician and before that, Sonia Gandhi the political entity around whose silence the Congress Party and its politics revolved. While Sonia Gandhi is central to this work, it is the events and episodes, which have guided and created politics in India over the last decade and a half. Naturally it is hard to argue that without the cause of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and subsequent decline in the Congress Party’s fortunes’ there might not have been the effect of Sonia Gandhi taking to politics in the first place. Thus, the book begins on a note of detachment the start of a new, more right wing Congress Party that had little in common with the Congress of Nehru or his ‘National Consensus’, they are the beginnings of a new Congress, a recollection of a phase. Without this phase, this break from the Congress of the past, there would have been no vacuum or requirement for Sonia Gandhi to enter politics. ‘This book also describes, in great detail the state of the nation and the social and economic milieu of India, within which its politics functioned throughout the 1990’s. Factors that played a role are all mentioned and argued about in this part of the book, including; ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP), the Babri crises and its social and political consequences, the pulls and pressures of inner party politics, issues such as corruption, rise of regional politics and electoral fortunes are all covered here. There is considerable attention paid to the individuals and personalities who directed and participated in the events of the time, both within the Congress and outside it. An agent whose arrival was required for all the preceding events covered in former chapters. It is a part that settles her into the role she personifies today as the grand matriarch of the Indian National Congress. It covers the initial jubilation, flanked by the minor disenchantment of other entrenched leaders in the party, her attempts to change and alter the party system and culture into her own vision, her relationship with figures of the time, across the political spectrum and the chastening electoral defeat of 1999.