TILBURG, Netherlands: Sonia Gandhi, leader of India's governing party, advised Europe on Saturday to embrace the diversity of its minorities.

Forcing people to conform "works in the short term, but in the long term it creates more resentment," Gandhi said after a rare public speech outside India.

Gandhi described India as a unified mosaic of diverse languages and communities, and cautioned that attempts to "crush identities will have negative results."

In her lecture, Gandhi referred to her own country when she said that "no government can last if it is seen to pursue narrow interests and is insensitive to the concerns of all sections of society."

Gandhi's lecture to the Nexus Institute of Tilburg University in the southern Netherlands was a personal reflection of her reluctant, tragedy-laced involvement with Indian politics, from her birth in a middle class Italian family until she inherited the mantle of India's Nehru-Gandhi dynasty from her assassinated husband, Rajiv Gandhi — the son and grandson of two other prime ministers.

Now 60, she was elected leader of India's largest party in 1998, and in 2004 rejected the chance to become the nation's leader, instead hand-picking Manmohan Singh as prime minister.

"Power in itself has never held any attraction for me," she told an audience of 800 academics, diplomats and the Dutch monarch, Queen Beatrix.

In public affairs, she said she tried to see that "the significant political decisions of my life flow out of the inner experience of emotion and belief, and of the need to be true to myself."

India's market-driven growth cannot go far or fast enough to eradicate poverty without a push from government, she said.

The market "is seen as the new ruling deity, but our experience shows that there is still a critical role for the state," she said.

Traveling in India, "the limitations of growth alone stare me in the face. People constantly demand that the government respond to their basic needs."

Despite rapid expansion, Gandhi said India remained in social turmoil "as political power flows to deprived people" who have rising aspirations.

"This ferment is a natural process" that comes with economic and social change, she said.

Associated Press