INDIA: NEW CONGRESS PARTY PRESIDENT SONIA GANDHI MAKES DEBUT

Описание: (6 Apr 1998) Natural Sound

The newly elected president of the Indian Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, made her leadership debut at a gathering of the highest body in New Delhi.

Party leaders have turned to the wife of slain Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the hope she will be able to unite squabbling factions of the once-powerful party.

The party was recently defeated in India's general elections.

The Gandhi political dynasty lives on in the Congress party - with Sonia Gandhi the new party president.

Hundreds of party workers cheered as she unfurled the party's flag to open the first day of the All India Congress Committee.

It's the new party presidents first formal public appearance since she was elected.

It's also the first one-day session of the All India Congress Committee, a forum of state leaders, since the general February-March election.

The Congress Party lost out in the recent general elections which resulted in a coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Sonia Gandhi's confirmation as president completes the transformation of the reclusive widow of slain former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

He was assassinated in 1991 - and Sonia had since stayed away from the front line of politics.

But after the 18-member Congress Working Committee ousted former party president Sitaram Kesri last month, Sonia decided to accept the post.

Kesri was blamed for causing splinter groups within the Congress.

Sonia Gandhi, who's 51, was unanimously confirmed by the convention, which routinely endorses the choices of the party's bosses.

As a show of unity, Kesri introduced the motion to confirm her as president.

On the agenda at the meeting was a political resolution questioning whether the B-J-P had put aside its Hindu supremacist agenda- as it had claimed to do when it assembled its broad-based coalition.

The B-J-P was also criticised by the Congress for following the dictates of its most extreme factions.

During her first formal address Sonia Gandhi praised party workers but said there was a lot more work to be done to help the Congress thrive once again.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"I am no saviour as some of you might want to believe. We must be realistic in our expectations. The revival of the party is going to be a long process involving sincere hard work from each and every one of us."
SUPER CAPTION: Sonia Gandhi, Congress Party President

For Sonia Gandhi's critics, it is the revival of a dormant political inheritance that she could pass on to her son or daughter.

They are both in their twenties and joined her on the campaign trail during the February and March elections.

Although out of the limelight, Sonia Gandhi has been considered a party power broker for years by virtue of her position as the heir to the party's political dynasty.

Between Sonia's husband Rajiv, his mother Indira Gandhi, and her father Jawaharlal Nehru, her family led India for 35 of its 50 years since independence.

Daughter of a builder in a small northern Italian town, Sonia Manio met Rajiv Gandhi in a Cambridge University cafeteria in 1965 and they married three years later.

She became an Indian citizen only after her husband entered politics more than a decade later.

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