SONIA Gandhi is back in India and back at work. But she has returned to an India changed, subtly but significantly, from the one she left.
The most powerful woman in the world's largest democracy, Mrs Gandhi spent five weeks out of the country this month and last, being treated overseas for an undisclosed condition.
Rumours that she was being treated for cancer at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Centre were not dignified with an explanation.
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This is how it has always been. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, provider of prime ministers and considered property of the country by many in India, fiercely guards its privacy where it can.
In contrast, when current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underwent heart surgery two years ago, his operation and recovery were covered in forensic detail.
While it has previously been accepted for the Gandhis to keep matters of health in-house, it seems not now. There is a growing clamour for a new era of openness from India's first family.
While Indians don't expect the comprehensive formality of American presidential physicals, they expect more transparency than they feel they are getting.
''Mrs Gandhi is the head of the largest political party in the country … therefore her health is undoubtedly of public concern,'' the Mail Today said this week. ''The party needs to inform the people, as well as its own cadre, as to whether Mrs Gandhi's health will permit her to be as active on the political scene as she has been over the last 13 years.''
Gandhis rarely attract boos in this country. But Rahul, the scion on whom hope for the family's, and the country's, future has been heaped, found himself the target of outright hostility last week when he visited in hospital those who had been injured in the bomb blast outside the Delhi High Court.
His visit lasted less than 20 minutes, Indian media reported, after families of victims turned on him, frustrated his party hadn't done more to address India's very real security concerns.
''Show some shame,'' people chanted, and told the man still most likely to be India's next prime minister to ''not play politics with terrorism''.
This is unfamiliar territory for the 42-year-old. For the first seven years of his political life, Rahul enjoyed popular and media indulgence. The crown of ''one most likely'' sat lightly on him, and the excited babble was of his ''potential''.
While Rahul's recent padyatra (pilgrimage) through the former Congress heartland of Uttar Pradesh fighting land rights issues for farmers captured media attention, polling suggests it failed to re-energise the voters his party needs to win back in the state's elections next year.
As well, in his mother's absence, and with India gripped by the anti-corruption hunger strike of Anna Hazare, Rahul faltered badly.
His last-minute intervention in the standoff, in the form of a speech to Parliament describing the protest as a ''tactical incursion'' attacking India's democracy, failed, and Hazare was able to force the Indian government into a humiliating backdown.
These have not been the first political missteps, and in the corridors that matter in Delhi, they have fed rumblings that Congress may have backed the wrong horse.
A 2007 cable from the US embassy in Delhi questioned Rahul's political savvy and asked whether the Gandhis should look elsewhere. ''Congress insiders complain that he [Rahul Gandhi] is a neophyte who does not have what it takes to become prime minister,'' then charge d'affaires Geoffrey Pyatt wrote. ''Their hopes have now shifted to yet another member of the Nehru dynasty, Rahul's sister Priyanka, as they await her entry into politics.''
Rahul's younger sister has long been spoken of as the brightest of the next generation, despite shunning a career in politics. But she appeared, without notice or fanfare, in the Parliament's visitor's gallery for her brother's recent speech. She changed the landscape again, simply by turning up.
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