MS Sonia Gandhi’s election as Congress president for the fourth successive term is something that carries surprise to no one in this country, inside or outside Congress.

The existence of Congress is so vitally dependent on the Nehru legacy that even if there were no Nehrus around, Congressmen would invent one. In the beginning, Ms Sonia Gandhi carried practically nothing of the Nehru legacy in or about her: she was a woman from another country fallen in love with Nehru’s maternal grandson, and being a good wife to Rajiv and a good daughter-in-law to Indira Gandhi was her closest link to the Nehru heritage. She had little knowledge of politics, even less of Indian politics; and she had no interest in being in any way a part of it.
If Ms Sonia became a politician the primary credit must go to Indira. It was not a direct political promotion of her by India; she did it by promoting Rajiv after the death of Sanjay who she was building up as her successor; Ms Sonia had to sometimes accompany Rajiv on his political tours, and by indirectly making that happen, Indira can be said to have indirectly introduced her to politics. The ‘father’ of the Nehru dynastic rule that the opposition and intelligentsia is so scornful of was Indira, and not Nehru whose name is associated with it. Nehru never promoted Indira to be his successor. Doubtless, he promoted her politically by taking her along on his international tours and by allowing her to take up organisational responsibility. But he did not groom her as his successor as Indira so brazenly did Sanjay or Rajiv.
After Nehru’s death, Lal Bahadur Shastri became the prime minister, not Indira. As history would have it, Shastri died within two years of taking over. He did not have the charisma of Jawaharlal but he knew how to administer the country and he had the courage of conviction. Shastri would have successfully completed the term and probably been elected as prime minister for a second full term on the basis of his strong performance, for Congress monopoly over Parliament was still unbroken, despite opposition fronts coming to power in several states in the late 1960s and 1970s. Indira was chosen as successor to Shastri not by a secret will of Jawaharlal or any invisible Nehru hand working but by a coterie of bigwigs of Congress organisation who told themselves two things: one, we must have a prime minister who must be under our control; and two, we could keep the people of the country with the Congress only by keeping a Nehru as its face. Indira was a tool that fitted well with their design.
However, that was not to be. Indira proved wilier and shrewder than them, with an ability to build or destroy someone. Her political style drove many Congress leaders out of the party, reducing the organisation to an extension of her personality. Only such ‘leaders’ who were prepared to be her ‘subordinates’ remained in the party. The party was totally subjugated to her. She was the one who got most votes for party candidates.
Even after Indira started promoting Rajiv, Ms Sonia would be largely in the background and indifferent to politics. A career in politics was out of the question for her. Even after Rajiv’s assassination, she remained non-committal to active political role for a few years, though never keeping herself out of the Congress picture. None of the Congress leaders who were the subordinates of Indira had the charisma or courage to try and take over the leadership of the party. They looked to Ms Sonia, and also to Ms Priyanka Gandhi. Ms Sonia was ridiculed for her Italian-accented Hindi and for her media shyness and predicted by many as fit for anything but the rough and tumble of politics. But the Congress leaders of Indira days were scared of a vacuum; they ran the risk of losing their political existence without an heir to the Nehru legacy being there at the head of the organisation. They should be credited with propitiating Ms Sonia to come out of her self-imposed privacy and lead them.
Ms Sonia has nothing of the charisma Nehru or Indira had. She is not a good orator either, and in Indian politics you need strong oratory to be able to be a great leader. You can be a leader without good oratory but you cannot be a great leader. The difference between good oratory and ordinary oratory is that while both are based on reasoning in order to influence the listeners, the former delivers the message with such emotional energy that the audience is overpowered by it.
Nor is she an extraordinary administrator. She ‘sacrificed’ her opportunity to be prime minister to become a super prime minister. That only came to mean that neither she nor the designated prime minister would have the freedom to decide on any issue without ‘consultation’ with each other. And consultations take time. Knowing her limitations in administrative ability, she has made it a habit to have as many committees and as many persons–wise counsels from government and non-government–as possible to ponder over everything and look into various aspects of it. The general consequence of her administrative style is mind-enriching delay and never-stopping clock for decision-making. Plato, who was highly critical of democracy, used to say that it was fallacious to presume, as democracy did, that the one who knows how to get votes also knows how to administer. Ms Sonia knows not to do either and yet she reigns. Good luck to her.