Sonia Gandhi’s ‘ultimate sacrifice’ in 2004 by giving up the opportunity of becoming the Prime Minister of India actually gave her many admirers who habitually miss the woods for the trees. Actually these people are not to be blamed for myopia is also a socially and politically accepted defect. Such people were fed again to their content by the latest trapeze act of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi.



Gaurav Sabnis who has the uncanny talent of opining on any matter under the sun (if not over it) has an excellent analytical post on the issue.

The BJP leaders who refuse to learn from their mistakes need to ask themselves - have they really come to terms with the changed rules of the game? Do they realise that they are fighting, not Indira Gandhi who was power-hungry and quasi-dictatorial and thus easy to make a public villain out of, but a prima donna named Sonia Gandhi who knows that she need not hold posts to pull strings. A woman who is brilliant at impression management and knows the value of a “moral high ground” in as emotional an electorate as ours.

In the blog Lead Kindly Forward, the author (who remained hidden despite my best attempts to find him/her) writes a very readable post titled I am well done on my left side, will you turn me over? The author writes something from a folk legend when the Roman Emperor Valerian executed all those who were associated with the Church. He writes the following that can only be comprehended by a few:

On August 10 all roads lead to the church of St. Lawrence in Belle, five miles from my native village Pajaka. A decade of my boyhood was spent there beseeching the martyr archdeacon of Rome, to ask the Good Lord to alleviate my earthy miseries. Many eloquent sermons that I heard on August 10 were explicit about what Lawrence did as treasurer of Christian Church in Rome when Emperor Valerian (who outlawed Christianity and executed entire church leadership in Rome including the Pope but spared Lawrence with his eye on the church wealth) ordered him to surrender the bags of church gold, silver and treasures. Mockingly he delivered the poor, sick and the destitute of Rome. For this, he was laid on a blazingly hot grid iron, to be roasted to death; where-in he mocked the Emperor: “My left side is well done; would you turn me over so you may have a hearty meal?”

That is the stuff Sonia Maino must have heard from village church pulpits in and around Ovassanjo: the great tales of renunciation, sacrifice and supreme faith in one’s destiny. As the bells peel every hour, day after day, in European villages, somewhere in the hearts of young boys and girls, a sublime desire awakens: to burn, not to become the Lenten Ash but to be a meal desired by lesser mortals for years to come. That is the fabled ‘Indian’ spirit too, (to believe our historians, whom I don’t) but so sadly missing in our lives that a fellow O3 blogger had to term it ‘un-Indian’.

I don’t know what to say on this. It is too much for me to digest such comparisons. May be Mother Teresa would be presented in the next time as an example for Sonia.



Also read Involuntary Sacrifice by Lok-Adhikar in Prajatantra who asks a question that is best left to you to judge in his blog:

Is Sonia greatest after the Mahatma?

Obviously, whose camp is he on is anyone’s guess.



Update: Actually, Prajatantra’s article analysed Sonia Gandhi’s resignation from a neutral angle in his post Involuntary Sacrifice and highlights the sycophancy culture in the Congress Party. He in his post has a very interesting note:

True to the Congress culture and character, sycophancy has taken over and the party is once again trying to portray her as the paragon of virtue

Gargi writes a superb note on the issue. In her post Falling for the Same Trick Twice, she writes;

The BJP has come off looking like the Indian cricket team - snatching defeat from the jaws of victory - may be a new improved tactic would be not to get so personal and strident when dealing with Sonia Gandhi - especially if they don’t want to make a martyr of her.

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