(((Just when things were getting plenty hot for Sonia, with
the BJP and Amar Singh's socialists stung and furious, she's
pulled an awesome display of Gandhian passive-resistant
Italo-Indian judo and simply left the Parliament and the
Congress Party apparatus entirely. Her enemies are sucking dust.)))
(((Presumably this will leave the martyred Sonia plenty of time to
hire more spooks and private detectives and page her way through those telephone-tapping logs. She's got to be a hundred times
scarier outside the Parliament than she is inside it.)))
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/24/news/gandhi.php
"Gandhi is scheduled to head to her former district this weekend to begin campaigning for a special election that she will certainly win. Meanwhile, her quiet, behind-the-scenes control over major political decisions remains unaffected by the drama. Gandhi may have martyred herself in public, but privately none of her power has been sacrificed." (((Who says the wily spirit of Mohandas K. is dead?)))
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1462080,curpg-3.cms
'Soon after Sonia Gandhi announced her resignation from the Lok Sabha and as National Advisory Council (NAC) chairperson, Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan said, "She has taken the moral high ground, something that the BJP can never do, as they have no morals. Does any other leader have the moral authority to do what Mrs Gandhi did today?" (((Well, no. They don't. They surely don't. You can't help but laugh!)))
http://smh.com.au/news/world/lights-camera-action-a-tale-of-two-families-in-indias-murkypolitics/2006/03/24/1143083994161.html
Lights, camera, action: a tale of two families in India's murky politics
(((This piece has got the full Bollywood angle.)))
By Hamish McDonald and agencies
March 25, 2006
A POLITICAL divergence between India's two most celebrated families has led to Sonia Gandhi, the dynastic matriarch heading the ruling Congress party, resigning her seat in parliament.
Two decades ago the Gandhi and Bachchan families combined political charisma and film industry glamour, taking holidays together in the country's tropical fringes. (((Too bad they never yet intermarried.)))
Installed after the assassination of his mother Indira, Rajiv Gandhi and his Italian-born wife Sonia headed a new wave of "computer-wallahs" intent on sweeping the cobwebs out of the Congress and getting India on a fast track to modernity. (((They're digging those cellphones, too!)))
Enlisted was Amitabh Bachchan or the Big B, leading man of Bollywood. Rajiv made him a Congress MP, and Bachchan's wife, Jaya, took the shy young Italian under her wing.
Fast forward to the new century. Rajiv is long dead, killed by a Tamil Tiger bomb in 1991. Sonia is holding the family fiefdom as leader in the wings, behind the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, while her son Rahul starts his parliamentary career, which might one day make him the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty's fourth-generation prime minister. (((Or he might become a film director, you never know.)))
Bachchan has long quit what he called the cesspool of Indian politics. (((Takes one to know one.))) But two years ago he became financially over-extended and lent the Bachchan name to the Samajwadi party, a North Indian populist party.
Jaya Bachchan was inserted as a Samajwadi member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house. But an aggrieved Congress loser in Lucknow filed a complaint that she sat simultaneously as MP and as chairwoman of the Uttar Pradesh Film Development Board, an "office of profit" in the Government.
A week ago, the Electoral Commission upheld the complaint after two years of deliberation, and disqualified Mrs Bachchan. Opposition parties then fingered Sonia Gandhi's chairmanship of the Government's National Advisory Council, and various perks held by dozens of other government figures.
On Thursday Mrs Gandhi headed off the dispute by resigning her advisory council position and the family seat in the Lok Sabha, the lower house, which she will recontest in a byelection she is sure to win.
Four months after having abdominal surgery, Amitabh Bachchan, 64, was back in the studios this week, shooting two films. The Samajwadi party says it will renominate his wife.
(((And the wiretap business will be forgotten in all the excitement – until the next wiretap scandal, that is. After all, centipedes spend most of their lives in the woodwork!)))
