Books and Arts; Book Review;Politics in India; Iron lady;

LAST year a supporter of Sonia Gandhi threatened legal action and succeeded in preventing the publication in English of “The Red Sari”, a fictionalised life which had already had a successful run in Spanish and Italian. Although a couple of biographies have been published in India, Rani Singh’s “Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny” is the first for an international market.

When Sonia married Rajiv, son of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in Delhi in 1968, nobody predicted great things for her. She was pretty, personable and very shy. Like her husband, she had few academic qualifications. Her father was a builder from a town on the outskirts of Turin. Although the Nehru-Gandhi family was not, as Ms Singh states several times, aristocratic, they and their circle could certainly be snooty. It was not unusual in the 1990s to hear Sonia Gandhi referred to in Delhi social circles as “the Italian au pair”.

Today Mrs Gandhi is the most powerful politician in India. Earlier this year when she went for treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, the government was left rudderless. Characteristically, no announcement was made as to where she had gone, or whether her illness was serious. Cabinet ministers were reduced to asking each other, and even in some cases the media, for information about her condition.

When she returned to India in September and resumed her duties as president of the ruling Congress Party, the immediate crisis appeared to stabilise. Mrs Gandhi’s position—which might best be described as a dynastic moral authority—now stems less from the fact that she is Rajiv’s widow than from her intuitive strategic sense and her discreet, often silent, ability to assert political control.

It is hard to determine just how she does this, since her senior colleagues know they would soon fall from favour if they broke the omerta that surrounds her. Sonia Gandhi almost never gives interviews, although the few she has done on Indian television have been surprisingly open and direct, recounting the tragedy of her husband’s assassination in 1991 and her own inclusive social ideals.

Ms Singh says she follows “her own brand of socialism”, which is an exaggeration. Rather than socialism, it is an emphasis on protecting the disadvantaged even while proceeding with India’s at times rapacious version of capitalism. Since she does not hold a ministerial post, Sonia Gandhi can appear detached from government policy, and row back from difficult decisions when they prove unpopular. A symbolic performance is combined with studious political negotiation.

There are several difficulties with this biography. Ms Singh, a London-based journalist and broadcaster, appears to think that her duty as a biographer is to write a hagiographical defence of her subject. The enthusiastic tone extends to most members of the Gandhi family. When Indira Gandhi made a controversial snap decision to nationalise India’s big banks, the reader is told simply that crowds danced in the streets in jubilation: “Indira had an instinctive feeling for what would please people and would move heaven and earth to deliver.”

There is no indication that Ms Singh has had access, during her research, to either Sonia Gandhi herself, or to any of the people who are close to her. The book shows scant political understanding. Sikh militancy, Kashmir, the Sri Lanka conflict and the Bangladesh war are recounted in school textbook prose, accompanied by some baffling non sequiturs.

When the narrative becomes more personal, the reader is offered anecdotes such as this: “Presented with a tray of freshly made juices, Sonia studied the options carefully: papaya, lime, orange, fresh mango, and coconut water, before choosing the last one.” Would history have turned out differently if she had chosen the lime?