Sonia being greeted by Singh at 10 Janpath. (Rajesh Kumar)

New Delhi, March 14: The tenure has been the longest in Congress history but the celebrations were probably the shortest.

Sonia Gandhi’s directive had been clear: she wanted no tamasha on her 10th anniversary as party president.

So 24 Akbar Road and 10 Janpath missed the usual scenes: the busloads of hirelings, bands belting out old patriotic numbers, office-bearers enduring long hours in the sun to perform that split-second genuflection and the endless sycophancy.

Such tamasha was last enacted in 2006 when Sonia quit her Lok Sabha seat after the office-of-profit controversy, contested it again and won it back.

“Those were incidents, this is an occasion,” an office-bearer explained. “Madam passed instructions that it should be graceful and short.”

It was over in 15 minutes. Congress Working Committee members, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, greeted Sonia at her home in the morning with flowers and shawls.

She was handed a copy of the party constitution and a silver plaque embossed with yesterday’s CWC resolution that praised her and declared the National Democratic Alliance the Congress’s chief opponent.

Sonia soon left for Hyderabad. The party workers from Delhi and Haryana who hung around on the lawns discussed graver matters such as combating the rising prices. A fit topic, since this was the plank that had handed Sonia her first big success months after she became party chief.

The Congress workers didn’t need to consult wholesale or retail indices. The party’s in-house canteen, contracted to Udupi food chain Sagar Ratna, had almost doubled its rates this week. A mini-thali now costs Rs 15 instead of Rs 9, and a full platter is up from Rs 15 to Rs 30.

It was, however, the price of onions and not uthappams that was the big issue in late 1998 when Sonia wrested Rajasthan and Delhi from the BJP, besides retaining Madhya Pradesh.

During her Rajasthan campaign, she ridiculed chief minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat for his Marie Antoinette-style declaration that those who couldn’t afford onions (selling at nearly Rs 100 a kg) could eat apples.

She won the capital’s voters over with a Hindi proverb that summed up the BJP’s plight: “Naach na jaane, angan teda (those who can’t dance blame the stage).”

But Sonia came into her own in adversity, after the blow of the 1999 Lok Sabha elections that pushed the Congress down to its worst ever tally of 118 seats.

As 2004 approached, she broke with the party tradition of “go solo”, setting aside ego and sentiment to strike alliances with Sharad Pawar and M. Karunanidhi. Pawar had once called her a “foreigner” and Karunanidhi was an alleged patron of the LTTE, which had assassinated Rajiv Gandhi.

Sonia again followed her instincts in rejecting the Prime Minister’s post. She proved sceptics wrong by making the “dual power centre” arrangement with Manmohan Singh work.

Sources said some of the biggest challenges Sonia now faces involve her own party. Rahul Gandhi recently identified one when he said there was no “internal democracy” in the Congress.

Sonia hasn’t held organisational elections during her decade at the helm. Now that her son has belled the cat, will she dare upset the entrenched power structures? Many in the Congress want to know.