Sonia Gandhi had told her children months before the 2004 Lok Sabha election that she would “absolutely not” become prime minister. Yet, confronted by alliance leaders who refused to accept her decision after the Congress-led coalition’s victory, she briefly surrendered with a barely audible ” theek hai “.
the question became immediate only after the Congress emerged as the principal party in the coalition that would form the government While she did not show any commitment in public during the election campaign. She also considered the expectations of Congress workers who had campaigned for the party and could see her refusal as an abandonment of responsibility. “My emotions were changing, moment to moment.
Months before the election in 2004, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi had asked their mother whether she would accept the post if the Congress returned to power. Neither child wanted her to become prime minister as both linked the office with the assassinations that had shaped their family – former prime minister Indira Gandhi was killed in 1984 and her son Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
“Absolutely not!” she replied, according to the memoir. When they asked if she was certain, she said, “I’m very clear. “They’d lived through the trauma of their grandmother’s assassination and the brutal murder of their father,” Sonia Gandhi said. In their minds, the office was inseparable from an increased threat to her life, she said. One minute I was clear, the next, I was torn,” she said.
Her memoir shows she refused the possibility of heading the top post after a lot of thought and that she had taken a very complicated decision. It had pressure from alliance partners, opposition from her children and a night during which she weighed her responsibility to the Congress against a decision she believed she had already made.
