Abdication, Italian style. Thrice did the citizens of Rome invite Julius Caesar to wear the crown, and thrice he refused. Aeons later, in Delhi’s sizzling summer, Sonia Maino Gandhi has turned down the request of the majority of members elected to the 14th Lok Sabha to accept the Prime Minister’s mantle.

If Caesar declined kingship to become the republican leader, Sonia’s refusal is perhaps the product of a lot more complex web of issues. At one level, it may be the realpolitik of an exceptionally high order. But it is also the imprimatur of a deep ethical conscience.

After Rajiv Gandhi’s death

“I listened to my inner voice,” she said at the Congress parliamentary party meeting on Tuesday, “and it was against accepting the post”. The words had the resonance of revelation. They took wing and flew to the roof of the Central Hall of Parliament, adorned by the portraits of great leaders, and made many of them look small, even if it was for a moment.

Mahatma Gandhi, the ultimate icon of sacrifice, was of course the exception. If he did not accept even the ordinary membership of the Congress, it is because he never faced the temptation of power, his mission ending with Independence.

At the Great Wall of China with Rajiv Gandhi in 1988

But Sonia pushed the bejewelled trophy of power away after winning what is arguably the hardest ever electoral battle. Against an enemy that overwhelmingly outnumbered her in men, power and resources.

In the span of a single day, from Monday when she told her aides that she’d not be the Prime Minister, and her formal announcement of the decision at the CPP meeting, she made over her image from a canny politician to a statesman with an unparalleled moral authority. “Sonia is now a real Gandhi,” a television anchor screamed in a moment of excitement.

While a crestfallen Congress braces to accept Manmohan Singh as her choice, and the BJP keeps its fingers crossed for a possible tidal wave of public anger for spearheading a hate campaign against her, the question that sweeps through the capital is: how true is the reason that Sonia has given for her refusal?

Voting in 1991 before Rajiv Gandhi left for Sriperumbudur

The question haunts the political class like a searing gust of the summer wind. Could it be that she was conscious all along of the deeply embedded cultural incompatibility between India and an alien Prime Minister, even if she were democratically elected?

Is it possible that the two assassinations in her family had left her ravaged within, and politics to her had become more a call of duty to her family honour than the Holy Grail of power?

With Rahul and Priyanka in Bhutan

Was it in response to some stern security warning about her and her two children, their threat levels recently upgraded by the Sangh parivar’s fierce campaign to stall her appointment?

It is an undeniable fact that outgoing Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee’s studied silence in the past few days on his party activists’ virulent campaign had left her worried, puzzled and saddened. During the campaign, Vajpayee said that his party would reopen the debate over the propriety of constitutional posts being claimed by persons of foreign origin.

Watching the 1982 Asian Games with Indira Gandhi

But starting a debate is one thing and unleashing an emotional campaign even before her being sworn in is another. By his silence, Vajpayee eloquently stated the agenda of the NDA in the next Parliament: to bring its roof down on Sonia’s foreign origin. Her personal and political worries obviously grew by the hour, driving her even more closely into the close family huddle of children and son-in-law, and finally propelling her to give it up.

The inadequacy of this explanation is that it presents her as yet another calculating politician who’d duck under some high-sounding excuse if the road ahead seems too full of danger. It is out of her character. In 1999, when Sharad Pawar and Purno Sangma humiliated her for being a foreigner with prime ministerial ambition, after having drawn up an elaborate plan to split the Congress and lead the breakaway group to the BJP, she experienced her first dilemma of her political career.

Paying tribute to Indira Gandhi in 1989

She quit the party rightaway, and wrote a letter of resignation that had a ring similar to her CPP speech of Tuesday. It read: “I came into the service of the party not for a position or power but because the party faced a challenge to its very existence and I could not stand idly by.”

The party rallied behind her and sat in on Akbar Road for days until she withdrew her resignation. But the letter had already defined her space in the political life of the country of domicile by marriage. It is limited to reviving the party.

When power was offered to her on a platter in 1991, after Rajiv’s assassination, with party workers shouting “Sonia lao, desh bachao” at her door, she bolted it firmly after issuing a terse statement which said: “The tragedy that has befallen me and my children does not make it possible for me to accept the presidentship of the Congress.”

It took her seven years to cross the first step and assume leadership of the party. But shunning “position or power” was a solemn covenant. It came back to her like a warning sign, encoded as the “inner voice”.

The strength of her consequent moral authority is certain to unravel in the future. It is true that India’s evolving democracy endows the office of the Prime Minister with more power than what the framers of the Constitution could foresee. With party offices reduced to rubber stamp from as early as the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the cabinet system generally ineffective, the Prime Minister wields almost sovereign power.

In her long years as a member of the first family, in power or out of it, Sonia has seen how quickly can reputations crumble when power comes unfettered. Indira Gandhi’s “massive mandate” took just a few years to become a dictator’s ignoble crown. Rajiv, the new hope of the nation, lost power in five years amid howls of execration for corruption charges. P.V. Narasimha Rao, the scholarly reformer of 1991, was a pathetic caricature of his former self when he was voted out in 1996.

By abdicating prime ministership yet holding on to her post as Congress president, Sonia can put South Block under a new set of checks and balances. Rather than being an alternative centre of power, 10 Janpath can emerge as a moral custodian looming over the maze of power corridors. It can avoid being if it wishes. It can rule from above instead of ruling by remote control, like the RSS bosses of Nagpur or the power hungry Balasaheb Thackeray of Mumbai.

The capital’s long evening of moral turbulence and public sycophancy ended when Priyanka, Sonia’s daughter, declared that it was never her mother’s desire to accept the prime minister’s chair. Son Rahul said he’d asked mama on the phone during the campaigning if she really intended to be the Prime Minister, and she had said no. The question that remains to be answered is, could the BJP get the drubbing it got if Manmohan Singh had been projected as Vajpayee’s rival, or Pranab Mukherjee, or Arjun Singh? Certainly not.

If the inner voice had been speaking to her in the past, too, she kept it close to herself and family members, resorting to the public ambivalence for which Renaissance Italy is famous. The vanquished, BJP, feels it has been cheated. The Congress, the victor, realises it has been led past the winning post by a person who’ll rule from her seclusion. The nation feels it has to live with a concept of power sharing that is foreign, literally.