India's ailing Congress party boosted its election hopes yesterday after Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of the assassinated prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, announced that she would campaign for the party in the general election next February.
Party members said she was the only person who could save the Congress from electoral disaster and hoped her announcement would end its series of recent setbacks including a number of high-profile defections.
"We not only welcome her decision but we are also indebted to her," the party president, Mr Stta Ram Kesri, said in New Delhi yesterday.
The beleaguered 113-year-old Congress Party, which suffered its worst ever electoral defeat in general elections last year, has ruled for over 45 years since independence in 1947. It is convinced Mrs Gandhi, the inheritor of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy, will enthuse its workers and provide mass appeal to restore its formal glory.
Mrs Gandhi's husband, his mother, Indira Gandhi, and his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a combined duration of power as prime minister of more than 42 years.
Mrs Gandhi formally enrolled in the Congress party earlier this year, six years after refusing to join it following her husband's assassination at a political rally in southern India. She was said to be anxious to revive its flagging credibility after dozens of party leaders, including a former prime minister, Mr Narasimha Rao, were charged with corruption.
Soon after at a party meeting she read out one of her husband's speeches, adding four sentences of her own in which she chastised Congress leaders for being too preoccupied with the business of grabbing power and losing touch with the masses. But ever since then she has kept her counsel, refusing to be drawn on whether she would eventually campaign for the party in an election.
Over the years, Mrs Gandhi has frequently been petitioned by Congress members to come forward and save the "party and India", but preferred to wield subtle power from the confines of her massive, fortified bungalow in colonial Delhi. She preferred to operate through a handful of loyal aides who conveyed her "commands" to the right quarters in government, almost always with a positive response.
Through her Rajiv Gandhi Foundation she also set about creating a mass base for herself by aiding the poor.