Jonathan Power on his meeting and interview with Sonia Gandhi:
I am ushered into Sonia G’s office. She barely acknowledges my
presence. “Buon giorno”, I say. There is no reply. I have been warned
that she’s cold and she doesn’t offer me a hand. She walks over to me
and asks me to sit down.
I look her in the eye and ask my first question to the Italian widow
of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by
a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.
“Do you mind if I begin with a personal question?” “Yes”, she says.
I ask her, as the victorious chairwoman of the Congress Party, whether
it was difficult to decide to go into politics, given the toll it has
taken on her family. “I am at peace about that”, she replies. “I have
thought it through”. Then she suddenly interjects, “I hope this isn’t
an interview. I just want us to get to know each other a bit.” I reply
defensively that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (who fixed me the
introduction) had said it could be an interview.
We continue, but without me writing in my notebook, and I lapse into
a gentler, more conversational style. “Why did the pull of politics
overcome your inhibitions?” “Congress was in disarray. It couldn’t win
an election. And we need to keep India as a secular state, encompassing
all religions.”
I ask her about her own religious beliefs and, like her
mother-in-law, the murdered Indira Gandhi, she replies, “I’m not
religious: my parents are not particularly religious although my mother
sometimes goes to church. “So on what basis do you make moral decisions
in family life or in politics?” “I suppose Catholic values are at the
back of my head.”
I push on. “What about nuclear weapons? You are one of those with
your finger on the button.” She grimaces. A God-spare me kind of look.
Clearly, with her and Manmohan Singh in charge, the Pakistanis must
know that the India will never threaten to use its nuclear weapons. Why
that doesn’t lead to disarmament is a question that nobody would give
me a straight answer to.
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