Sonia Gandhi

"Mohit, as an Indira loyalist, had a special regard for her heirs. But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a power elite, to use sociologist C.Wright Mills term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congresss first family."

"India in the 1970s was a land of horrible poverty. The death rate for newborn babies was more than 100 per thousand. In Gandhijis real India, it was hard to find a village of pucca houses or people in those villages who could write their names. These were things never discussed in the drawing rooms in which Rajiv and Sonia spent their evenings, so the India of poverty, disease, deprivation and dirt never intruded into the life of the woman who would one day become de facto Empress of India. Later she loved saying in the handful of interviews she gave that she had never understood why anyone saw her as a foreigner because that is not how she saw herself. And the carefully vetted interviewers never asked why then she had become an Indian citizen only after her husband became a politician."

"It is absolutely essential that our party plays an active role in ensuring full vaccination coverage. At the national level, the daily rate of vaccination has to treble so that 75 per cent of our population gets fully vaccinated by end of this year. No doubt, this is dependent entirely on the adequacy of vaccine supply. We must continue to put pressure on the Union government which has, at our Partys insistence, finally taken on the responsibility for this. At the same time, we have to ensure that registration takes place, that vaccine hesitancy wherever evident is overcome and vaccine wastage is minimised."

"Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency…. What I couldnt tell was whether Singhs rise to power represented the future of Indias democracy or merely an aberration.... In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi…more than one political observer believed that shed chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party... He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of Indias main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)... In the dim light, he (Singh) looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Partys dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?"