KEEP AN EYE ON THE BODYGUARDS:

The Once and (Probably) Future First Family of India: Written off as out-of-touch and nepotistic, the Nehru-Gandhi family dynasty is poised once again to lead India. (AMY WALDMAN, 5/14/04, NY Times)

If agreement with Congress Party allies can be reached over the weekend, Mr. Gandhi's mother, Sonia Gandhi, 57, will become India's next prime minister, following her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi, who led India for five years in the late 1980's.

He, in turn, had followed his mother, Indira Gandhi, who served as prime minister for 16 years.

And she had followed her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India's prime minister for its first 17 years after independence, and a key architect of its quasi-socialist economy, its constitutional democracy and its secular foundations.

In the 1930's his father, Motilal Nehru, a successful lawyer, was president of the Congress Party, which traces its roots to 1885.

The family's almost uninterrupted dominance over more than half a century of Indian politics broke down over the last 15 years, and ended in 1996.

But throughout its reign, the family acquired an aura that mixes the right-to-rule of the British royals, the tragedy of the American Kennedys — complete with the assassinations of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi — and traditional South Asian respect for family and public sacrifice.

In truth, India's election results seem less a Congress victory than a defeat of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, in which the traditionally anti-incumbent Indian voters roundly turned against their governing coalition.

Nor is there evidence Nehru ever envisioned a dynasty.

"It was Indira Gandhi who created the dynasty," an Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, wrote in a recent essay in The Telegraph. "She brought her sons into the Congress, and made it clear to all, within and outside the party, that she expected them to succeed her."