INDIA: Sonia Gandhi is only the latest of India's great political family to rule the world's largest democracy. Rahul Bedi in New Delhi looks at her lineage
Sonia Gandhi first achieved fame as an Indian prime minister's glamorous Italian wife. Soon after, she became his grieving, reclusive widow in 1991, determined to stay away from politics despite pleas to head the Congress Party in order to protect her two children.
Yesterday the cloistered 57-year old Sonia, who entered politics reluctantly six years ago, was busy cobbling together a coalition that is expected to thrust her into the post her murdered husband once held.
But Sonia ji - as she is called by reverential and fearful Congress workers - remains shy, chary of meeting the press, obviously unsure of herself, giving the impression of someone who would be much happier elsewhere.
Circumstances - others say karma - have thrust her into the maelstrom of Indian politics as the torchbearer of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has ruled India for nearly four decades since independence in 1947. She became an Indian citizen only in 1986, soon after her husband, Rajiv, became prime minister.
From the shy and retiring daughter-in-law who rarely ever spoke in public Gandhi has, since joining politics in 1998, tried to model herself on her charismatic mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, one of India's longest-serving prime ministers.
Indira Gandhi succeeded her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, as prime minister and, in turn, was followed by her son, Rajiv, in the same office.
With noticeable similarities in their brisk walking style and choice of starched, cotton saris, Sonia Gandhi tries to emulate her mother-in-law's style of plunging straight into the heart of crowds, mingling with the masses, holding hands and getting cosseted by them.
Wearing a wooden smile, a grim determination and little else she has doggedly travelled more than 42,000km since December delivering emotionless speeches in highly accented Hindi to boost the flagging spirits of her party after it was voted out of office in three of four crucial states last December. Surprisingly, it has paid off.
After Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in 1991, Sonia distanced herself, her daughter, Priyanka, and her son, Rahul - also an elected MP - from public life for some time. She secreted herself behind the walls of her heavily barricaded colonial bungalow in Lutyens's Delhi, periodically receiving Congress leaders who were constantly engaged in bitter internecine rivalries and begging her to head the party founded in 1885 to fight the colonial government for independence.
Sonia Gandhi officially took charge of the Congress Party in 1998.
But her stiff body language betrayed immense nervousness as she made her political debut in January 1998 near Madras in southern India at the spot where a suicide bomber assassinated her husband.
She later became an MP from her husband's constituency in northern India by the highest-ever number of votes.
But with the Congress party facing increasing marginalisation, her political orientation was quick and tested under constant, unforgiving criticism.
Congress insiders said her political maturing came from learning from her husband's mistakes and her own, including her darkest political hour in 1999 when she failed to muster a parliamentary majority to form the government despite claiming it.
The daughter of a small Italian building contractor and raised in a conservative Roman Catholic household in Ovassanjo, a village outside Turin, Sonia Maino met Rajiv Gandhi at Cambridge where he was an undergraduate at Trinity College and she a language student in the university town.
They married in 1968, and the 21-year-old Italian bride moved into Indira Gandhi's residence and became a housewife.
Rajiv Gandhi, then a pilot with the domestic Indian Airlines, was uninterested in politics. But after his younger, politically ambitious brother died in an flying accident, Indira forced Rajiv into the Congress party and began grooming him as her successor.
After Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984, Rajiv became prime minister, riding a wave of public sympathy over his mother's killing. He won the election that followed a few months later with an unprecedented majority, but his attempts to open India's stagnant economy and shrink its bloated bureaucracy cost him a lot of his popularity.
He lost power in 1989 following allegations of corruption in an arms import scandal and was killed two years later while campaigning.
After Sonia Gandhi entered active politics, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of the Prime Minister, Atal Beharai Vajpayee, constantly attacked her on her foreign origins, saying her Italian birth should keep her from becoming prime minister.
It was an argument she dismissed as unimportant and she remained withdrawn.
"They have so totally failed that they have to pick up this one issue," she said in a rare television interview earlier this year.
"I never felt they look at me as a foreigner," she said. "Because I am not. I am Indian."