Latin America Rediscovers Mahatma In Sonia

Latin Americans love heroes. They delight in being able to underpin their revolutionary fervour and political ideologies with the charismatic face of a dauntless figure that transcends time and space.

So when the name Gandhi surfaced in the confusing parade of more than 6,000 faceless candidates campaigning for a complex four-phase election in the worlds largest democracy, Latin Americans took notice.

It didnt matter that Sonia Gandhi was not a blood relative to the great Mahatma. It didnt matter that she was not even a native of India and had only inherited the name by marrying into the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. It didnt even matter that she wasnt running for any office.

 

The name Gandhi conjured up romantic illusions of that grandiose hero of all humanity that was so certain of his own cause that he never bothered to pick up a gun or wear a ski mask.

And so it began. From the very day that Rajiv Gandhis widow first stepped out of her self-imposed seclusion to agree to campaign for the demoralised Congress party, the Latin American media began devoting nearly ten times more its air and print space to India than before.

For the first time, the Indian elections had a face and a name for our readers, says Carlos Ferreyra Carrasco, editor of the International Section of El Universal newspaper in Mexico City, the nations largest daily.

It wasnt so much that they were really interested in trying to understand the labyrinth of intricacies that stir 600 million voters to divide their loyalties amongst 650 parties. They just wanted information about Sonia, he says.

And that is what Ferreyra Carrasco gave them. In the last month, he notes, his paper has run two full-page profiles of the Italian-turned-Indian heroine.

Mexico Citys government-backed Cronica, which usually devotes only four or five pages of its 32-page daily to international news, also ran a full-page report on the Indian electoral process and the influence Sonia Gandhi has had on voters.

Argentinas left-leaning Diario Clarin and progressive Pagina 12 each ran two-part series on Indias elections, dedicating more than half the agate lines of their reports to the magnetic role Sonia has played in revitalising the moribund Congress party.

In Chile, where steadfast political dreamers still cling to the memory of their former leader Salvador Allende, the powerful Ercilla newsmagazine ran a five-page report on the spiritual and ideological parallels that linked the murdered president to the tragic 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

These two men, the text reads, were separated by nearly two decades of chronology and an entire ocean of distance, but in spirit, they were one. They both died in service to humanitarian values and dedication to social justice.

Like Allendes daughter, Isabel, who took up her fathers political banner writing about the turbulent years of the Augusto Pinochet military regime that followed his death, the Ercilla article depicts Sonia and her children as the next generation of freedom fighters for the worlds downtrodden masses.

What the Chilean magazine conveniently manages to neglect to mention in its analogy of the two families is the fact that neither Isabel Allende or Sonia Gandhi perceive themselves as the ideological reincarnation of the men they survived.

I think every Latin journalist, at least at the start of his career, is a bit of an armchair revolutionist who feels he can change the world with his words, says Mario Enrique Maldonado, a correspondent for the Guatemalan journal Kommentar currently based in Mexico.

Whenever we hear about heroic figures, our appetites are whetted and we want to write about them. Who in Latin America has heard of Yashwant Sinha? But the name Gandhi has universal appeal. And Sonia is bright and pretty and easy to like. So when Indian politics adopt her image, they suddenly become international news.