Quotes of the Day

From inside the Gandhi SUV, there's little sign of looming disaster. Sonia, 57, is sitting up front; her children Rahul, 33, and Priyanka, 32, are behind, and all three are beaming out at a crush of villagers who envelop the silver jeep and whose faces and skinny bodies are sliding across its windows like a human car wash. Sonia opens her door to stand on the sill, and the crowd shrieks and surges forward, a hundred arms straining for a supplicatory touch of her feet. Priyanka waves, and a tight knot of some 100 hands waves back. Rahul opens his window and watches with bemusement as showers of fragrant rose petals rain into his lap. It's a scene that has been repeated about 20 times in the past hour, and has at times threatened to bring the Congress Party election campaign to a complete halt as it crawls across the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, from Rahul's constituency of Amethi into Sonia's neighboring seat of Rae Bareli. Sonia has abandoned her own car after marigolds clogged the fan belt, and Rahul has lost a signet ring and some skin off his carelessly outstretched right hand. "This is chaos, chaos," mutters Sonia, peering at the windshield smeared with sweat and crushed petals. "Just stay in the car, mommy," chuckles Rahul, patting his mother's shoulder.

This is not how you might picture a political dynasty headed for a humiliating fall. But as India votes over the next three weeks in its first general election of the 21st century, the truth is that the ardent reception the Gandhis are attracting is more about their place in Indian political lore than about Congress's current electoral standing. The Gandhis and Congress won India its independence and gave it leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi (not a relation), Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. They ruled India for 45 of its first 50 years and laid the foundations for the country's current explosive economic growth. But today, Congress has atrophied into a party bereft of fresh people and ideas, and one that also appears lamentably out of sync with India's new dynamism. "What this election is about is whether we see the historic collapse of Congress," says politics expert Professor Achin Vanaik of New Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia university. "It's about whether the vote kills Congress."

Sonia Maino never wanted anything to do with politics. She was born in the small village of Orbassano in northern Italy, and at 19 met 21-year-old Rajiv Gandhi in 1965 at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge, England, where they both were undergraduates. "For him, there was never anybody else," says a family friend. "For her, too." The couple married in 1968 in New Delhi. Rajiv became a pilot for Indian Airlines and Sonia threw herself into running the house for her Prime Minister mother-in-law Indira, managing the servants and organizing receptions under the lemon trees behind Indira's colonial Lutyens bungalow. For 12 years, the couple enjoyed a life of easy privilege on the edge of India's first family, watching their children grow and, on Sonia's insistence, keeping a firm distance from public life.

The cycle of death that drew Sonia into politics began in June 1980. Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in New Delhi and, over Sonia's angry objections, Rajiv insisted that his duty to family and country obliged him to replace his brother as his mother's right-hand man. Then, in October 1984, Indira's Sikh bodyguards assassinated her to avenge the Indian army's storming of the Sikh Golden Temple to root out militants sheltered inside. In a hospital, over her mother-in-law's dead body, Sonia again begged Rajiv to put family before politics and, again, he refused. Said Sonia to an Indian journalist last month—only her second interview ever: "There was my mother-in-law's body, lying by our side. Basically, I felt that most probably Rajiv would end up the same way." She was right. Rajiv won office, becoming the third Nehru-Gandhi Prime Minister, but in May 1991 a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber killed the 46-year-old over the Indian army's 1987-90 incursion into Sri Lanka. It took six years and an internal party crisis that threatened to split Congress before Sonia, too, bent to that same Gandhian sense of obligation and agreed to take her husband's place at the head of the party.

It was a remarkably selfless—and courageous—decision. All the more so because Sonia must have suspected what the rest of India would soon learn: that she would prove to be a woefully inadequate party leader. Described by friends as shy and private, Sonia comes across as almost devoid of charisma. She assiduously avoids reporters and, whenever possible, political events. She shows scant comprehension of economics or international affairs, and seems entirely out of touch with the galloping high-tech industry that's driving the economy. She refuses to respond to personal attacks over her foreign birth, or to make any of her own. She has learned a halting Hindi, but her improving fluency only highlights her failure to spell out any vision for the nation, prompting the joke that she is inarticulate in three languages. And experience has failed to make her a more inspired political player. At a rally last month in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, she resorted to the same lame vow—"The things that Indira and Rajiv believed in, I stand for them also"—as when she first assumed the Congress leadership. On the campaign trail she agrees to every supporter's request—fix the water, build a road, reopen someone's husband's factory—with a harried and unconvincing "Yes, we will do it." With her mournfully heavy mascara, her graying hair scraped into a stern ponytail and her tired face an impassive mask of duty, she is the picture of the devoted widow—and the antithesis of the bold Congress leaders of the past.

Meanwhile, Congress itself has come to seem increasingly fossilized. The party that threw out the British colonizers, led India through three wars with Pakistan and laid the foundations for today's economic growth is now widely seen as a collection of distinguished but inactive has-beens who are blind to the party's present ignominies. Nowadays, the party's sole identifiable belief—beyond its vaguely left-of-center economics—seems to be an awed deference to the Gandhis. The only election slogan Congress supporters ever use is: "Sonia Gandhi! Rahul Gandhi! Priyanka Gandhi!" As one Indian correspondent derisively puts it: "Today's Congress is a personality cult. Only with no personality, and a dying cult."

While time has left Congress behind, it has blessed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules India through a coalition. If the party that once harnessed revolution now symbolizes an old India of family, inefficiency and stagnation, so what was once a fringe party fascinated by fascism and Hindu legend is coming to represent a new India driven by an emphasis on technology and the dreams of millions of aspiring capitalists. In part, of course, the BJP simply got lucky, assuming power in 1998, just as the nation's IT industry began to blossom. And today's thundering economy—which grew by 10.4% in the last quarter—may owe more to last year's bounteous monsoon than to enlightened business reform. But the BJP has had the wit to adapt its message of strident Hindu nationalism to a more mature one of prosperous peace with Pakistan and loud pride in India's growing economic heft.

The BJP's pro-business agenda appeals to India's middle class, currently numbering 300 million out of a population of 1 billion, and increasing. And it can legitimately claim to be more tech-savvy than Congress. During this election campaign, the BJP even sent recorded voice messages from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to all 110 million landlines and mobile phones in the country—an appealing display of technological prowess to the 53% of eligible Indian voters (355 million people) under 25 years old.

In the last election, in 1999, the BJP won 182 seats and, with its allies, a majority of 295 in the 543-member Parliament. Congress won 114, its worst-ever result. Opinion polls in India are known primarily for their inaccuracy, but this year they broadly predict the BJP alliance will hold or increase its majority and that Congress will at best hold its share of seats. The BJP, says Vanaik of Jamia Millia Islamia, "will become the fulcrum of Indian politics."

Can anything save Congress? Rahul Gandhi, a dashing figure who only entered politics in January, hints at plans for an ambitious party makeover, the way Tony Blair reformed Labour in Britain. But for now Congress is mainly counting on the dissatisfaction of those left behind by India's economic boom—a huge demographic in a country with an estimated 370 million people living on $1 or less a day—and the sentimental adoration of the masses. While Sonia Gandhi and her children are being mobbed in Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Vajpayee and his deputy Lal Krishna Advani are holding a rally a couple of hours away in the state capital, Lucknow, which is Vajpayee's constituency. Whatever the BJP's electoral standing, the polite applause and lackluster cheers that greet the two leaders bear no comparison to the wild scenes swamping the Gandhi bandwagon. As Rahul says of these hordes: "This is not political. This is emotional." Rahul says the affection for his family stems from its dedication to public service. But in the hysteria of the crowds, the fevered press discussion surrounding Rahul's dimples and Priyanka's fair skin, and Rahul's insistence that "the same way they feel for us, we feel for them," there is the suggestion of something else: the bond between monarchs and subjects.

The Gandhi family is adapting to the role played by the royal families of Europe as they, too, ceded power: bastions of tradition, patrician benefactors, guardians of a nation's soul. And of all the Gandhis, it is the reluctant leader Sonia who most personifies this. The sacrifice of leaving everything she knew—losing her brother-in-law, mother-in-law and husband, then accepting the life that killed them—has earned Sonia a respect and affection in her adopted country that resonate far beyond politics or nationality. Priyanka's Indian businessman husband Robert Vadra describes it simply as "unconditional love." Watching the men and women who turn out in their hundreds of thousands to shout "Sonia Gandhi!" and to throw roses at her, it's hard to dispute that.

And occasionally there are signs that Sonia may share some of the crowd's feelings. In four long, hot days of campaigning, she visibly relaxes only once—when she calls a sudden unscheduled halt in the middle of a dust-bowl plain and strides out to where she has spied a group of female nomads under a tent of sticks and black plastic. The women have only the faintest idea of who she is. Sonia cannot understand their dialect. And the photographers, trailing far behind, cannot hope to capture this briefest of off-guard moments. But away from the crowds and the press and the party meetings, as Sonia Gandhi stands alone in a field, hugging the poorest of India's poor, it is difficult to tell whose grin is wider.

• Alex Perry | Amethi
• India's Gandhi clan believes it is duty bound to lead the country. But voters in the current election may disagree