India’s politics has many strange aspects, but none stranger than the career of the country’s most powerful political leader. Sonia Maino, who was born in a small Italian village, met Rajiv Gandhi while at language school in Cambridge. A devoted housewife who detested politics, she persuaded her husband to stick to his job as an airline pilot. But after the assassination of his mother, Rajiv entered politics at an impressively advanced level, prime minister of a country of almost 1bn people.

Six years after Rajiv’s murder, Sonia also went into politics at the top: she became leader of the Congress party. When Congress won the 2004 election, Mrs Gandhi surprised many by declining to be prime minister and appointing an able technocrat, Manmohan Singh, instead. To her great credit she recognised that she has no relevant political aptitude or experience, but two powerful qualifications. She is the widow of the grandson of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and she bears the name of India’s most celebrated political figure (to whom neither she nor her dead husband was related).