Gandhis the Kennedys of India

The recent political developments only add to the lore of a private family that lives in the public.

NEW DELHI - Power, tragedy and celebrity collide with the mundane at the former home of Indira Gandhi, a colonial-era bungalow with a manicured lawn where buses disgorge thousands of tourists every day.

They admire the late prime minister's Scrabble set and peer into her son Rajiv's toolbox. Their children pose for photos in front of Rajiv's clothing, charred by the suicide bombing that killed him in 1991.

The last stop on the tour: The walkway where Indira was assassinated in 1984 by her bodyguards and where her blood spatters are preserved under glass. To the family's millions of fans, it marks the martyrdom of yet another Gandhi who died for India's downtrodden.

The house is as much Graceland as Monticello. Visitors often have the fervency of disciples and, out front, hawkers sell Pepsi, ice cream and souvenir pictures of Rajiv's mangled corpse.

After more than 100 years in the spotlight, the Nehru-Gandhi clan is more than a political dynasty. The Gandhis are India's Kennedys - a circus and a soap opera, a stable of power-brokers, a deeply private family living almost completely in public.

One of Indira's biographers calls it "the Gandhi cult." Among the fiercest believers, the term is no exaggeration.

This month, after a stunning election upset, Rajiv's Italian-born widow Sonia Gandhi sparked a frenzy when she declined to become India's first foreign-born prime minister - and the fourth in the dynasty to lead the nation.

Thousands converged on Sonia's heavily guarded New Delhi compound, demanding she take the job. A former member of Parliament put a gun to his head, threatening to kill himself live on TV if she didn't change her mind. Some young men sat under a banner pledging to "Fast Unto Death."

When Manmohan Singh, the distinguished 71-year-old economist she hand-picked to be prime minister stopped by, the mob attacked his car with its fists.

"The people are so crazy. They are so in love with her personality," said Mahavir Singh, a lawyer watching the melee. "They can think of nothing else."

Cultlike displays of reverence are not unusual in India, which prizes melodrama - from the coy swaying of actors in Bollywood musicals to the way supporters lavish politicians with fatuous praise.

It can reach deadly extremes.

When popular actor Amitabh Bachchan fell ill in 1982, two fans committed suicide, hoping to trade their deaths for his life. In 2001, when actor-turned-politician M.G. Ramachandran died, dozens of people killed themselves in grief.

"We're very passionate and very emotional," said Abhilasha Kumari, a sociologist at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, searching for an explanation for such excesses.

The love of theatricality is partially rooted in Hinduism's thousands of gods and elaborate rituals, as well as cultural laws requiring children to revere their parents.

All that comes together with the Gandhis - right now, with Sonia and her son Rahul, newly elected to Parliament.

While historians debate how much good the Gandhis have done, their supporters see them, Kumari said, as "the mythic family that is always there for India."

Sonia's decision not to be prime minister could help the dynasty even further, seen as a mother's sacrifice to smooth the political futures of her two children.

Critics, though, see nothing but a democratic form of feudalism.

The modern Gandhi dynasty - unrelated to Mohandas Gandhi, the pacifist and independence leader - can be traced to the late 1800s and the wealthy, influential anticolonialist Motilal Nehru. His son Jawaharlal became India's first prime minister. After his 1964 death, his daughter Indira took the job, and defined the next two decades of Indian life.

Then the cult took hold.

"Indira is India, India is Indira," ran a Congress party slogan from the late '70s, when she was out of power after her repressive 21-month state of emergency.

She carefully molded an image of "Mother Indira," claiming the nation's poor and dispossessed as her own.

"I have to look after them," she said. "They sometimes fight among themselves, and I have to intervene, especially to look after the weaker members."

Such talk has broad appeal among India's destitute, trapped for generations by poverty and caste. But for the Gandhis, the myth it created has made normal life impossible.

"For this family, nothing has ever been a family affair," Sonia's daughter Priyanka said. "We do not feel that our parents belong to us."

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