As India turns 71 next week, Outlook zeroed in on 21 individuals who have made a lasting impression on this country – for both good and bad – so far in the 21stcentury.  And we got 21 equally important personalities to write on the 21 individuals we chose.

In this column, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor writes on Sonia Gandhi.  "She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the common peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers," he says. 

A novelist, seeking to tell the story of Sonia Gandhi, might be forgiven for seeing a fairytale element in the narrative. Beautiful foreigner comes to strange new land and marries handsome prince. They enjoy years of bliss, until the prince is obliged, in painful circumstances, to take over the kingdom, and discovers the harsh realities of ruling a turbulent realm, culminating in the unspeakable tragedy of his own assassination. The queen retreats into silence and mourning, until the insistent supplications of her courtiers compel her to emerge and take the destiny of the kingdom into her hands. Bliss to triumph to tragedy to triumph again—a classic tale: I should have begun this foreword with the words “Once Upon A Time.”

And yet—there is a twist in the tale. For the queen, offered the crown on a brocade cushion, turns it down. She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the common peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers. They don’t write fairytales like that, not even for the woman once dubbed by an unkind observer the “Cinderella of Orbassano.”

The story of Sonia Gandhi is remarkable at every level, and the fairytale metaphor barely begins to scratch the surface of its extraordinariness. But which story is the one to tell? That of the Italian who became the most powerful figure in a land of a billion Indians? That of the reluctant politician who led her party to an astonishing electoral victory that not even her own admirers could have foretold? That of the princess, used to privilege, who became a national symbol of renunciation? That of the parliamentary leader who rejected the highest office in her adoptive land, one she had earned by her own hard work and political courage? That of the woman of principle who demonstrated that one could stand for the right values even in a profession corroded by cynicism and cant? That of the novice in politics who became a master of the art, trusted her own instincts and discovered she could be right more often than her jaded rivals could ever have imagined 

In the many attempts to unwrap the enigma, from Spanish novelist Javier Moro’s sensationalist The Red Sari to Congress politician K.V. Thomas’s Sonia Priyankari, the story of Sonia Gandhi is all these stories, and more. It is easy enough to pinpoint the defining moments of her remarkable political career, from her initial refusal to succeed her murdered husband in 1991 and her decision to campaign for the party in 1996, to her triumph in the 2004 elections, her startling renunciation of office, and then her continuing leadership of the party and the United Progressive Alliance through two successive terms in office.

She prefers to ­remain behind the throne, ­walking with the ­peasantry, rallying the ­people but ­leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers.

One must not flinch from the controversy over her foreign birth, over which so much has been made by nativists, though her admirers point out that Sonia Gandhi is “Italian by birth and Indian by karma.” The territorial notion of Indian nationhood advanced against her in the mid-to-late 1990s and again in 2004 is a curious one on many counts, and particularly so when it relates to the Indian National Congress, a party that was founded under a Scottish-born president, Allan Octavian Hume, in 1885, and amongst whose most redoubtable leaders (and elected presidents) was the Mecca-born Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the UK-born Nellie Sengupta and Irishwoman Annie Besant. Even more curious is the implicit repudiation of the views of the Congress’s greatest-ever leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who tried to make the party a representative microcosm of an India he saw as eclectic, agglomerative and diverse.

Sonia Gandhi herself made her own case at the time of her political ascent to her party’s leadership. “Though born in a foreign land, I chose India as my country,” she pointed out. “I am Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. India is my motherland, dearer to me than my own life.” But Sonia Gandhi alone was never the issue. The real issue is whether we should let party politicians, or the

Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/sonia-gandhi-legend-of-the-renunciate-by-shashi-tharoor/