Sonia Gandhi, the highly influential president of India's ruling Congress Party, yesterday launched a vituperative attack on what she called the unchecked greed of bankers and businessmen, recalling the glory days of her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi who began nationalising commercial banks in the late 1960s.

Those who believed the fast growing emerging market had decoupled from Europe and the US "were wrong", she said, pledging government support to protect the poor from the effects of financial turmoil.