Living Politics.
What India has taught me

Sonia Gandhi
Sonia Gandhi was born on 9 December 1946 in a small village in North Italy to Stephano and Paola Maino. In 1965, during her stay in Cambridge, England, she met Rajiv Gandhi, the elder grandson of the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s daughter, Indira, married to the politician Feroze Gandhi, had participated in India’s struggle for Independence and supported her father in his political career. She became India’s first woman Prime Minister between 1966 and 1977, and again between 1980 and 1984.

After their marriage in 1968, Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi lived with Indira Gandhi in the Prime Minister’s residence in New Delhi, where their two children were born, a son, Rahul (1970), and a daughter, Priyanka (1972). In 1980 Rajiv’s younger brother Sanjay, who was politically active at his mother’s side, died in an aeroplane accident. Rajiv gave up his job as an airline pilot to enter active politics in his stead. In 1984, at the age of 66, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by one of her Sikh bodyguards, out of revenge for the army’s storming of a Sikh holy place in Amritsar to flush out separatists and terrorists. Her son Rajiv succeeded her as Prime Minister at the age of 40. In 1991 Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in a suicide attack carried out by a member of the militant separatist Tamil movement from Sri Lanka.

Sonia Gandhi resisted the Congress party’s pressure for her to succeed her husband and for many years avoided politics and public appearances. During this time she wrote two books about her husband. Following the defeat of the Congress party in the 1996 general election, with the party in disarray and demoralized, Sonia Gandhi accepted the post of party president in 1998. She led it to victory in the 2004 general election and won world-wide admiration when she turned down the post of Prime Minister, nominating instead former finance minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.As president of the Indian National Congress and chairperson of the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, Sonia Gandhi today functions as an influential national and party leader. She fights for India’s preservation as a secular state with a democratic government, a tolerant society ‘which combines compassion with competence, equity with excellence’. She has initiated political reforms aimed at combating poverty and social discrimination, her greatest motivation being a strong sense of justice and belief in human dignity. Sonia Gandhi as a political entity bridges ethnic, religious and cultural divides in India and strives to preserve and advocate the humanistic and pluralist heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Concert door:
Ed Spanjaard, piano; Peter Hoeben, hoorn; Hans Wolters, hobo; Arno van Houtert, klarinet; Joszef Auer, fagot.