By IANS,
New Delhi : Priyanka Gandhi, the daughter of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, says that she “really admires” her mother’s evolution from a shy person to a confident leader.
On the campaign trail in Sonia Gandhi’s constituency of Rae bareli in Uttar pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi told the CNN-IBN television channel that her mother was “doing a wonderful job”.
“I really admire her evolution,” Priyanka said, referring to her mother as a “shy person”.
“If I look at her today, she doesn’t need a paper to read (speech), to say what she needs. She makes decisions beautifully with advice from everybody.”
“I think she is doing a wonderful job,” she added.
On Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) raking up her mother’s Italian origin, Priyanka Gandhi said: “No, it really doesn’t matter what Modi thinks. Clearly the rest of India does not think like him. So, he should be in sync with the public.”
Commenting on her brother, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka reiterated that he had the “qualities” to be the prime minister, but added that they were not fixated on him occupying the country’s top chair.
“His aim is to work for the people. It is not to become prime minister, not to have a post and not to lead the government. So, if Rahul ends up becoming PM, wonderful. But if he doesn’t, it will mean the same thing for us,” she said.
Priyanka also spoke about her visit last year to a Tamil Nadu prison to meet Nalini, one of the people convicted for her father former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.
Pointing out that she went there for “very personal reason”, Priyanka Gandhi added, “Initially when I went, I felt the need to forgive. When I reached there, I realised that I was nobody to forgive, for she has suffered as much as I have.”
She believed that Nalini had also done it not out of personal reasons, but out of her own suffering. “And I think that people… when they do such things, they do it out of suffering. They don’t do it out of an intention to hurt other people, they do it out of their own suffering.”