The following year, she met Rajiv Gandhi at the Varsity Restaurant, where she was working as a part-time waitress, while he was enrolled for an engineering degree in the Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 1964, she went to study English at the Bell Educational Trust's language school in the city of Cambridge. She aspired to become a flight attendant. Gandhi completed her schooling at the age of 13 her final report card read: "intelligent, diligent, committed would succeed well at the high school for teachers". Gandhi has two sisters who still reside in Orbassano along with their mother. Stefano had named Sonia and her elder sister Nadia in the memory of the Italian participation in the Eastern Front. The family house had leather bound books on writings and speeches of Mussolini. He had fought against the Soviet military alongside Hitler's Wehrmacht on the eastern front in World War II, was a loyal supporter of Benito Mussolini and Italy's National Fascist Party. Stefano, who was a building mason, established a small construction business in Orbassano. She attained primary education attending the local Catholic schools one of her early teachers described her as "a diligent little girl, studied as much as was necessary". Sonia spent her adolescence in Orbassano, a town near Turin. She was one of three siblings: Sonia, Nadia and Anoushka, raised in a traditional Roman Catholic Christian family. Sonia Maino was born on 9 December 1946 to Stefano and Paola Maino in Lusiana (in Maini street), a historically Cimbrian-speaking village about 35 km from Vicenza in Veneto, Italy. Sonia Gandhi's birthplace, 31, Contrada Maini (Maini street), Lusiana, Italy (the house on the right) Although she never held any public office in the government of India, Gandhi has been widely described as one of the most powerful politicians in the country, and is often listed among the most powerful women in the world. She stepped down as the Congress president in December 2017, but returned to lead the party in August 2019. Gandhi's active participation in politics began to reduce during the latter half of the UPA government's second term owing to health concerns. Her foreign birth has also been a subject of much debate and controversy. Over the course of her career, Gandhi presided over the advisory councils credited for the formation and subsequent implementation of such rights-based development and welfare schemes as the right to information, Food security bill, and MNREGA, as she drew criticism related to the Bofors scandal and the National Herald Case. Gandhi declined the premiership following the 2004 victory she instead led the ruling alliance and the National Advisory Council.
Gandhi has since been credited for being instrumental in formulating the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which was re-elected to power in 2009. Under her leadership, the Congress went on to form the government post the 2004 elections in coalition with other centre-left political parties. She agreed to join politics in 1997 after much pleading from the party the following year, she was nominated for party president, and elected over Jitendra Prasada. Sonia Gandhi, however, kept away from the public sphere, even during the years of her husband's premiership.įollowing her husband's assassination, Gandhi was invited by Congress leaders to lead the party, but she declined. She then moved to India and started living with her mother-in-law, the then- Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, at the latter's New Delhi residence. After completing her primary education at local schools, she moved for language classes to Cambridge, England, where she met Rajiv Gandhi, and later married him in 1968. She returned to the post in 2019 after her son, Rahul Gandhi, resigned.īorn in a small village near Vicenza, Italy, Gandhi was raised in a Roman Catholic family. She took over as the party leader in 1998, seven years after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, her husband and a former Prime Minister of India, and remained in office until 2017 after serving for twenty-two years. She is the president of the Indian National Congress, a big tent political party, which has governed India for most of its post-independence history. Sonia Gandhi ( née Maino born 9 December 1946) is an Indian politician.