Priyanka Gandhi, the sister of India’s leading opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, is ready to run in her first election, after decades of expectation among her followers.
Ms Gandhi is a member of India’s most famous political dynasty, the Nehru-Gandhi family, thus her election debut will be widely followed.
The 52-year-old will run for the Wayanad seat in Kerala, India’s southernmost state, after her brother resigned.
If Ms Gandhi wins, all three Gandhi family members will be present in India’s parliament.
Her mother, Sonia Gandhi, a former Congress president, is a Rajya Sabha MP.
Her brother, Mr Gandhi, won the recent parliamentary elections in both Wayanad and Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli districts.
The by-election will mark the end of a decades-long wait by Congress supporters for Ms Gandhi’s involvement in electoral politics.
For years, Ms Gandhi was considered the more popular of the Gandhi siblings with many blaming the “lacklustre leadership” of her brother for a string of Congress defeats between 2014 and 2019.
From an early age, people have pointed to Ms Gandhi’s resemblance to her grandmother and former prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Ms Gandhi was actively involved in the election campaigns of her mother from the late 1990s. She also campaigned for her brother when he actively joined politics in 2004.
Senior leaders have praised her political acumen and her flair for engaging with people.
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