- NEW DELHI -- Sonia Gandhi
stunned the Indian electorate yesterday by turning down the chance to become
India's first foreign-born prime minister.
-
- The Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, assassinated
in 1991, announced she was stepping aside "for the stability"
of the country.
-
- Her decision - on the day she had been expected to be
confirmed in the post - followed five days of high political drama as she
tried to forge a working coalition in the face of a stock market crash
and attacks on her foreign origins from Hindu nationalists.
-
- Within minutes of her announcement the benchmark Bombay
Stock Exchange had climbed by almost 100 points, after record losses on
Monday.
-
- Despite acquiring enough seats to form a minority administration,
Mrs Gandhi said yesterday that she was abdicating as prime minister-elect
to facilitate her overriding ambition - the formation of a stable, secular
government.
-
- Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister and the architect
of India's free market reforms in the early 1990s, is expected to take
her place.
-
- Mrs Gandhi, who has always shown reluctance to seek power,
is understood to have come under pressure from her children, Rahul and
Priyanka, not to follow in the footsteps of their father.
-
- Jyoti Basu, the veteran Marxist leader from Bengal who
pledged to support a Gandhi-led government, said her allies had been powerless
to change her mind.
-
- "If the children say we have lost our father, and
we don't want to lose our mother, what can we do? It's a family affair,"
he said. "We cannot give any assurances on security, this is a violent
country."
-
- Explaining her decision to a stormy parliamentary meeting
of the Congress Party, Mrs Gandhi said: "The past six years I have
been in politics one thing has always been clear to me: that the post of
prime minister has not been my aim.
-
- "I was always certain that if ever I found myself
in the position I find myself in today, I would follow my inner voice.
Today that voice tells me I must humbly decline."
-
- Only hours earlier Congress officials had announced that
Mrs Gandhi would be sworn in as prime minister on Friday - the 13th anniversary
of her husband's assassination by a Tamil suicide bomber in 1991.
-
- Throughout the election campaign Mrs Gandhi, who became
an Indian citizen in 1984, had been subject to vitriolic personal attacks
from Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists.
-
- In an unprecedented display of political bitterness,
the defeated BJP-led alliance had promised to boycott any swearing-in ceremony.
-
- The attacks on her foreign origins - which "deeply
hurt" Mrs Gandhi according to Congress officials - intensified after
her surprise election victory, causing fears that a Gandhi-led administration
would be constantly undermined by the issue.
-
- For rank and file Congress supporters and their allies,
however, the decision to step aside appeared to be tantamount to handing
a victory to the BJP and the sectarian politics of intolerance that last
week's election result appeared to have vanquished.
-
- Somnath Chaterjee, leader of the Communist Party of India-Marxist
(CPM), said the BJP-led campaign against Mrs Gandhi was "a grotesque
attempt to nullify the verdict of the people".
-
- Thousands of Congress supporters gathered outside Mrs
Gandhi's residence in New Delhi to try to persuade her to change her mind.
-
- Several wrote letters in their own blood asking her to
reconsider. One man, a former provincial Congress legislator, stood with
a revolver to his temple and threatened to commit suicide.
-
- But Mrs Gandhi was adamant. Addressing her MPs in India's
parliament, she asked her party to "accept my decision and recognise
that I will not reverse it".
-
- Her judgment that the new administration would be more
stable without her leadership appeared to be vindicated by the reaction
of India's stock markets.
-
- After recording record losses on Monday, by the close
of trading the market was up by a record 371 points.
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