Now, You ALL knew I was speaking of Italian born Sonia Maino Gandhi, who yesterday scored a shocking upset, and became the first foreign born Prime Minister of India :)

Sonia was able to overcome vehement opposition based on her Italian birth.
Below are Articles from BBC and New York Times.
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BBC News
Profile: Sonia Gandhi

The unexpected success of the opposition Congress party in the Indian general election is focusing attention on its Italian-born leader - Sonia Gandhi.

The 58-year-old, enigmatic widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, could now become the country's next leader.

Mrs Gandhi is the latest torchbearer of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has ruled India for 44 of the years since becoming an independent nation in 1947.

After distancing herself from politics after her husband's assassination in 1991, Mrs Gandhi was initially seen as a reluctant and near-reclusive politician.

She officially took charge of the Congress party in 1998 and was elected to parliament in the last elections in 1999.

Before the surprise results in the current general election, Mrs Gandhi's future in Indian politics had looked somewhat uncertain.

Under her leadership, the party had turned in its worst performance since independence in the 1999 general elections. Congress also performed indifferently in last year's state elections.

Revered name

However, the Gandhi name is still revered in India and Congress had been looking to Mrs Gandhi to translate that feeling into votes.

Her political opponents have attempted to rake up her Italian descent as an election issue saying that the choice for voters is between an Indian or foreign leader.

Her campaign this year was boosted by the entry of her son, Rahul, as a candidate. Her daughter Priyanka has also campaigned energetically for her.

Originally from Turin, Italy, she met her future husband when she was a language student in Cambridge, England.

The couple married in 1968 and she moved into the house of her mother-in-law and then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.

She was propelled into the forefront of the Indian political scene when her husband Rajiv was picked as the successor to the Gandhi-Nehru crown, following the death of his brother in a plane crash in 1980.

Sonia is a familiar figure in Amethi, her husband's rural parliamentary constituency in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh which her son Rahul now represents. She represents the neighbouring seat of Rai Barelly.

She had been brought into politics by the Congress party, which has continued to regard a Gandhi as its best, crowd-pulling figure.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Profile: Sonia Gandhi
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3546851.stm
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VAJPAYEE, PREMIER OF INDIA FORCED TO QUIT AFTER VOTE UPSET
New York Times
By Amy Waldman
May 14, 2004

NEW DELHI, May 13 — Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose Hindu nationalist party had led India since 1998, resigned Thursday after his governing coalition suffered a shocking upset in parliamentary elections.

Not a single major poll or pundit had forecast the defeat, which was seen as a repudiation of Mr. Vajpayee's agenda of privatization and other economic reforms.

Though the economy is growing rapidly, for struggling farmers and the legions of unemployed, the coalition's message that an ascendant India was banishing poverty was a mockery.

The peace process with Pakistan, which had advanced on the trust built between Mr. Vajpayee and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, could also be affected.

The Indian National Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister, capitalized on the widespread discontent to emerge as the single largest party.

The Congress appeared poised to form the country's next government with the support of electoral allies and the country's Communist parties.

"The Congress Party will take the lead to ensure our country has a strong, stable and secular government at the earliest," Mrs. Gandhi said in a brief news conference on Thursday evening.

It is considered likely, but not certain, that Mrs. Gandhi, who was born in Italy, will stake a claim to the prime minister's post. But even some of the party's allies have questioned whether this nation of more than a billion people should have a leader of non-Indian origin.

Still, the voters' verdict represents a remarkable and unexpected resurrection for the Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, which ruled India for 45 of the 57 years since independence but had been losing support for 15 years.

Early returns showed the Congress and its allies with 212 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament.

Mr. Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party and its coalition partners won 180 seats.

The Left Front — a coalition of Communist parties — scored perhaps its best showing with 64 seats, while parties that find their bases in the lower castes and Muslims of India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, won a total of 67 seats.

Twenty other seats were scattered or undecided.

The results represented a landslide against the B.J.P., which had expected to return to rule on the strength of Mr. Vajpayee's popularity. The party had called elections six months early, hoping to capitalize on an economic boom and Mr. Vajpayee's peace talks with Pakistan.

Instead, the party itself earned only 136 seats, down from 182 in 1999. In gambling on early elections, Mr. Vajpayee, denied himself the chance to become the first non-Congress prime minister to complete a five-year term.

In a televised speech Thursday night, Mr. Vajpayee said the will of the people in the world's largest democracy should be respected and cherished.

"It is for you and history to judge what we achieved during this period," he said. "I do, however, have the satisfaction that our country is now stronger and more prosperous than when you placed the reins of office in my hands."

The meaning of the election results for the country's direction will take time to emerge. Some business leaders have expressed concern that a change in government could slow economic reforms, particularly if the new government includes leftist pro-labor parties.

>From the opposition, Congress has often been critical of deregulation and privatization for their effects on the poor.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued a statement saying voters had rejected the "pro-rich economic policies" of the B.J.P. and its "pro-imperialist foreign policy."

Sitaram Yechury, a top Communist leader, said the ministry that is overseeing the privatization of state-owned industries should be disbanded.

But it was the Congress Party that began the economic changes in 1991 under Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, who could return to the position. And in West Bengal, where the Communists have held sway, they have largely backed reform.

While there were fears that the peace process with Pakistan would founder, officials in Islamabad, the capital, said Thursday that it would continue, and Mrs. Gandhi pointed out that her party had supported dialogue with Pakistan even before the B.J.P. had.

The end of six years of Hindu nationalist rule could bring other changes as well, from less culturally conservative policies in confronting the AIDS crisis, to the end of efforts to recast educational curriculums according to the Hindu nationalist perspective. 

And while there were many Hindu-Muslim riots during the Congress Party's rule, it is unlikely to tolerate a state government like Gujarat, where the police stood by in 2002 as riots raged that killed 1,000 Muslims, and failed to help Muslim victims or prosecute Hindus accused of attacking them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party had constructed an American-style presidential campaign around Mr. Vajpayee's perceived popularity, adopting a slogan of "India Shining," sending the 79-year-old leader with barely functioning knees to address 84 rallies, and producing campaign materials focused almost exclusively on him.

But their strategy ran aground on the realities of the Indian parliamentary system, in which voters turned on incumbent legislators who they felt had done little to deliver.

Indian voters are known for their anti-incumbent attitudes, and the majority of sitting legislators were rejected in the three-week election. Among those who lost their seats were several high-profile cabinet ministers, including Yashwant Sinha, the foreign minister, and Murli Manohar Joshi, the minister of human resources and development.

But even more, voters — particularly, but not exclusively, in rural areas — seemed to rebel against the idea of "India Shining."

Among a small knot of men who gathered Thursday to watch the results on a news ticker in New Delhi, the resentment of the B.J.P. and its focus on a "feel-good factor" was palpable.

Many expressed dismay, which is common among Indians nostalgic for the quasi-socialist economy of India's first 40 years, at the economic reforms with which Bharatiya Janata had proudly identified itself.

"Basically it is the anger of the working class," said Sawali Rai, 34, who works in a state-onwed bank. "Privatization, no government jobs, prices rising. On the pressure of the World Bank, they are pressuring the common man."

And unlike in the United States, where the most prosperous also vote the most, in India it is the poor who turn out in greatest numbers.

That meant that the very voters for whom India has been shining, the middle- and upper-class urbanites who have benefited most from globalization and reforms, are also least likely to vote.

The party also seemed to suffer from its association with the Hindu nationalism that had powered its rise. The carnage in Gujarat alienated most Muslims, who make up about 12 percent of the population, and many Indians concerned about the weakening of the country's secular identity. Congress and its allies, while differing on economic policies, political strategies and personalities, had united around a secular platform.

At the same time, hardcore Hindu nationalists have been disillusioned by the party's tempering of Hindutva, or "Hindu-ness." In part because of resistance from other members of its coalition, the party had not advanced the building of a Hindu temple at Ayodhya, considered the birthplace of Lord Ram, where Hindu nationalists demolished a mosque in 1992.

Both Hindu nationalists and some B.J.P. leaders had sought to capitalize on Mrs. Gandhi's foreign origins and her Christian roots, but the issue failed to take with Indian voters.

"She's a citizen of the country," said Uday Singh Rawat, 63, a retiree. "The Constitution says she can be prime minister."

Still, Pramod Mahajan, general secretary of Bharatiya Janata, was ready to revisit the issue. "It's a democracy," he said. "Indians have a right to choose, and if they have chosen, she has a right to rule. Still, I maintain that it's shameful for me if a foreigner rules this country."

The 1990's were characterized by a series of unstable coalition governments, and in 1999 Mr. Vajpayee's government fell because of a lack of support from coalition partners. But since its re-election in 1999, his National Democratic Alliance, initially formed from 25 parties, has ruled uninterrupted, and Mr. Vajpayee cited that as a great achievement in his farewell speech.

"We strengthened Indian democracy by demonstrating that coalition governance can be stable," he said.

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Premier of India Is Forced to Quit After Vote Upset
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