A reluctant politician, Sonia Gandhi is now the toast of the Congress leading the UPA, which is all set to form government for the second consecutive time, in a crowning glory for her ascendancy in the party.
Often attacked for her foreign origin, the shy and reticent 62-year-old Italy-born politician has travelled far since she tentatively entered the country's political maelstrom in the 1990s after the assassination of her husband and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, she won a general election victory in May 2004 but then took a pass on the prime minister's job, giving it to pro-business Manmohan Singh.
Though critics used the move to call into question her power, Sonia is still widely revered, especially among the country's millions of poor. She solidly stood behind the prime minister with her unwavering support and worked in tandem.
The campaign for the 15th Lok Sabha elections saw the naturally shy Sonia take on leaders of rival BJP with aplomb blunting their venomous attacks on the party and Manmohan Singh.
Sonia seems to have shed her formerly taciturn manner, routinely working the crowds at political meetings and displaying a more combative approach.
After Rajiv's death, Sonia became reclusive, but she later returned to public life ready to serve.
Sonia Maino, the daughter of a small building contractor who was raised in a conservative Roman Catholic family near Turin, was eventually persuaded to pick up the torch and became the leader of the Congress party in 1998, giving it a Gandhi figurehead once again — a proof how much Congress still depends on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Sonia has often dismissed her foreign birth as unimportant. She is little known in Italy and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She said that her foreign birth might work against her with some, but that in rural areas — especially among the woman and the poor — she was no outsider.
"I never felt they look at me as a foreigner," she had once said. "Because I am not, I am an Indian."
She first came to prominence as Prime Minister's wife, then as his widow, nearly two decades back.
As she paved her steps slowly into the highly influenced corridors of the Indian politics, Sonia emerged as Chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance in the Lok Sabha and the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party. In 2004, she was named by the Forbes magazine the third most powerful woman in the world. For the year 2007 she was named among the Time magazine's 100 most influential people.
Born on December nine, 1946 in a middle class family in Italy, she went to the UK in 1964 to study English at the Bell Educational Trust's language school in the city of Cambridge.
It was here that during a certificate course she had a chance meeting with Rajiv, the elder son of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
