New Indian prime minister anticipated

NEW DELHI, India -- After all the pundits had written off the family dynasty that dates back to the birth of modern India, the legendary Nehru-Gandhi clan has captured the kingdom once again.\nAnd its matriarch, Sonia Gandhi, is likely this week to become India's first foreign-born prime minister, further burnishing the family name.\n"I feel deeply humbled," Gandhi told fellow Congress party lawmakers after they elected her their Parliament leader Saturday in a major step toward making the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi the next leader of the world's largest democracy.\n"I stand here today, in the space once occupied by my great teachers," she said, naming India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and her late husband.\n"I would like to remember them today. I would like to honor them."\nHer children, Rahul and Priyanka, also have secured a place in history for the family's fifth generation. He was elected to Parliament Thursday and his younger sister is likely to follow once her toddlers are packed off to school.\n"With the entry of the children, suddenly it gives the Congress party a 25-year horizon," said Rajiv Desai, a close family friend and Mrs. Gandhi's media adviser. "Suddenly, the Congress is thinking: 'Wait a second, here's this old guy who's 80 and doddering with steel knees, and look at us -- the future is ours.'"\nThat doddering old guy is caretaker prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who resigned Thursday after Gandhi's Congress party unexpectedly devastated his ruling alliance in Parliament elections last week.\nThe 79-year-old, lifelong politician with knee replacements belongs to an old guard who attacked the 57-year-old Gandhi's Italian origins and claimed her children were coasting on the family name.\nMillions of Indians, particularly those out in the villages untouched by Vajpayee's "India Shining" economic boom, thought differently. Like the Kennedy's in the United States, the Gandhis have tried to maintain an aura of service and sacrifice for their country.\n"During my travels with Rajiv to the remotest and poorest parts of India, I experienced the depth of feeling people had for him, how much he cared for them and the extent to which their love energized him," Sonia Gandhi wrote in her 1992 book, a pictorial tribute to her husband.\nShe said Rajiv cared as much for commoners as he did for kings, regardless of caste or religion.\n"He was an Indian and everyone saw him as their own."\nTheir 33-year-old daughter, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and 34-year-old son, Rahul -- children of a prime minister, grandchildren of another and great-grandchildren of the political architect of modern India -- also have revived hope among the disenfranchised that someone who has the power to make a difference will actually attempt to do so.