She’s “nothing more than the mother of two children”. She is the “mother of the nation”. She’s a blackfaced widow, who will bring bad luck to the nation. She’s the inheritor of her late husband’s legacy. She’s India’s bahu. No, she’s a foreign-born, an Italian opera singer.

We chose to define Sonia Gandhi in just two ways: as a foreigner and as a woman whose identity was anything — mother, wife, widow, daughter-in-law — but that of an individual.

It sounded like an especially bad episode of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi was in progress. Give her status, said the local hairdresser: she is the mother of the next generation of Gandhis. Nonsense, said George Fernandes, his words repeated by a tired auto-driver: her only claim to be in politics is that she bore Rajiv two children. Anyone can be a mother; it takes more than that to be a PM. (I could argue that most mothers are better trained to lead the country than most Prime Ministers are trained to rear children, but that’s another story.)

Congress sycophants declared emotionally that Sonia Gandhi was “the mother of the nation”. Yeah, right: recast her in the mould of Mother India, in the tradition of a thousand saintly, suffering women who are defanged, disarmed shadows of the fullblooded goddesses who preceded Bharat Mata.

Why shouldn’t Sonia be welcomed into the Indian political family, argued a recently married beautician. If we can’t receive her with open arms, what sort of reception can our bahus receive from their sasurals? Yes, said the presswaali, she is the nation’s daughter-in-law. This is her country now.

The other side of this logic is less appealing: that Sonia Maino is “our” property, having lost the right to her homeland, that a wife has an inescapable right to be accepted by her husband’s family because she no longer has a place in her own home.

Few people used the term “widow” openly, perhaps because it recalled another widow. Indira Gandhi was dubbed a “goongi gudiya”, a “dumb doll” initially: the only doll she resembled by the end of her reign would have had to have been modelled on Ma Kali. The ones who did use the W word did so pejoratively. Sonia was unlucky, a kaalmukhi, her face blackened with the ashes from her husband’s pyre, responsible for the tragedies of the Gandhis. Sushma Swaraj declared that she would tonsure her head — i.e. act as though she suffered the bad fate of all widows — if Sonia became PM: mockery heaped on insult. No one questioned the rhetoric of widowhood: either you were a burden, and unlucky to boot, or you were brave, surviving without male protection. No one thought to ask what our men were supposed to be protecting us against.

I’m not sure where “Italian- born opera singer” came from —a mistranslation of au pair, perhaps? Never mind. It fitted the stereotype of foreign women as shameless hussies (Monica Lewinsky was also invoked) who commit acts that go against Indian culture.

That phrase captures it all for me: all the xenophobia, all the fear and hatred of women, especially “loose” women who are, after all, just women on the loose. Bahu, mother, wife, widow, foreigner: each word is a trap. To call Sonia Gandhi a mahatma is to fit her yet again into an overlarge garment that successfully obscures the person inside. I have no idea who that person is: the labels gave us no chance to find out.