... Just as close followers "pressurised" Jawaharlal Nehru to induct Indira ... into the AICC Presidentship, Indira Gandhi was similarly encouraged to bring first Sanjay and then Rajiv into the effective second position in Congress politics. Sonia Gandhi, in fact, has taken much longer than other Nehrus to withstand the entreaties from loyalists of the family.

It was only after seven-and-a-half years of requests to take over the party that she agreed. The next step, in the words of a loyalist, is to get Madam to shift from 10 Janpath to 7 Race Course Road". Only with a Nehru in the Prime Minister's House will India make progress, the Nehru acolytes believe.

Sonia Gandhi has correctly identified the bulk of her "loyalists" as being among the obstacles to such a progression. In 1969, Indira Gandhi was fortunate in that almost the whole of the top level of the Congress party stood with the "Syndicate" against her. On relatively young or obscure office-bearers remained loyal. Thus, between 1969 and the elections in 1971, she was able to field a fresh set of faces and capture the public imagination.

Today, Sonia Gandhi has halted the one process that could have helped her a wholesale shift of top-level Congress leaders to the BJP. This would have saddled the saffron fold with an unattractive mass of office-seekers, and given her the freedom to experiment with new faces.

Rather than reshuffling the pack, a new one is needed. However, whether Sonia Gandhi will go ahead and do this is open to doubt. Certainly Rajiv Gandhi backtracked in weeks from his 1985 Mumbai declamation against power-mongers. Secondly, even assuming that the new President will change the composition of her party's frontline, that by itself will not be a sufficient condition to first halt and then reverse its decline in public support. Policies are as critical as personnel in deciding such an outcome. ...

The vague nostrums and filmi declarations of the new AICC President will do little to remove her handicaps: the perception that as an individual of privilege, she is far removed from the people.

Two, that as a person whose perceived social interaction is mostly with foreign diplomats and relatives, Sonia Gandhi is distanced from the nationalist strand that is driving Indian politics ...

Mikhail Gorbachev was popular everywhere but in Russia. Narasimha Rao was appreciated abroad and reviled at home. The reason was that they could not coat their policies in acceptable flavours. Sonia Gandhi's reliance on the same team that helped Narasimha Rao to his rejection by the Indian voters bodes ill for the hopes of Sonia followers ... (Source: The Times of India)