Afghanistan: For years, they dominated Indian politics. Now the Gandhi dynasty risks being sidelined. --- RAE BARELI, India — When Sonia Gandhi came to this dusty corner of India nearly 20 years ago, thousands turned out to see the beautiful, Italian-born widow of a slain former prime minister and beg her to enter politics. “Sonia, save India!” they chanted. -- Since then, Gandhi has become the most powerful woman in India and president of its oldest political party. But on a rainy spring afternoon, when she returned to her family’s political stronghold in the state of Uttar Pradesh to campaign for reelection to parliament, her crowd was small and muted. -- As voting in national elections enters its final phase, Gandhi’s Congress party lags behind in most polls. Now reputedly in poor health, Gandhi has said she would like to step down in a few years. But her dimple-cheeked son, Rahul, 43, has shown little aptitude to take over. -- The party's sliding popularity threatens to sideline a political dynasty that has dominated Indian politics since independence, when Rahul’s great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, became prime minister. The Gandhis won deep loyalty over the years for their message of lifting up India’s impoverished masses. But the country’s growing urban and middle classes are now angry about government corruption and want politicians who focus on jobs rather than social-welfare benefits. -- Gandhi, 67, was nearly three hours late for her recent campaign stop in Amethi, her son’s electoral district. When she finally took the podium, she painted the election as a stark choice between her secular party and the main opposition party, led by Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist. -- The opposition seeks “to divide the country in the name of religion, caste and creed,” said Gandhi, wearing a perfectly draped sari and speaking in heavily accented Hindi. “Our party’s objectives bind the country together for progress.” --- Since she took over as the head of the 128-year-old Indian National Congress party in 1998, Sonia Gandhi has wielded outsize influence in the country of 1.2 billion. Forbes magazine ranks her No. 9 on its list of the world’s most powerful women, behind Hillary Rodham Clinton but ahead of Oprah Winfrey. Yet in many ways Gandhi remains an enigma. She shuns the spotlight, relies on the advice of a few close advisers and her two children, and hardly ever gives interviews. -- Her strength is her silence,” said Rasheed Kidwai, the author of “Sonia: A Biography.” The fact that her appearances are so few and carefully crafted “makes her something regal" in the noisy Indian political landscape, he said. -- Gandhi led her party and its regional allies to victory in 2004 and 2009. She turned down the chance to become prime minister in 2004, feeling her foreign birth would be an obstacle in a country still scarred by centuries of foreign rule. Instead, she chose a soft-spoken economist, Manmohan Singh, to take the country’s helm. -- Nonetheless, Gandhi has been the driving force behind many of the country’s costly social programs enacted in recent years — such as guaranteed rural employment and the distribution of grains to the hungry. Her power is discreet but vast — a recent book by a former top aide to the prime minister suggested she had hand-selected the country’s finance minister without consulting Singh, a charge her party denies. --- Sonia Gandhi was an unlikely heir to the Gandhi political legacy. She grew up in modest circumstances in a small town in Italy, the daughter of a mason. In the 1960s, not long out of high school, she traveled to Britain to study English and met a Cambridge University student named Rajiv Gandhi — the grandson of Nehru and the son of India’s powerful prime minister, Indira Gandhi. -- The couple married in 1968 and moved into the prime minister’s residence. Sonia at first found the adjustment difficult, Kidwai wrote. Her mother-in-law insisted they speak only Hindi at the dinner table. But Sonia eventually renounced her Italian citizenship. -- “I came here because I was madly in love with my husband and he was with me,” Gandhi said in a rare television interview in 2004. “It didn’t matter what I had to face.” -- Rahul was born in 1970, daughter Priyanka in 1972.