On the Parliamentary elections in India In May 2004 Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party announced that she would not be accepting the post of the Prime Minister of India and that Manmohan Singh would be the PM. This was greeted by her admirers as a great renounciation on par with that of Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and an expression of her "Indian" character. Let's look at these aspects: can one renounce what was never one's to claim ? I might as well renounce the Presidency of the United States. The legal eligibility of Sonia Gandhi to assume the post of the PM was never clearly established and all that the Congress party has to claim for this position is the "people's mandate". The Congress Party never projected her as the PMerial candidate and while she certainly nursed ambitions of being the PM, the potential roadblocks on the way possibly dissuaded her. 

As Swami Vivekakanda said in his lecture on Karma Yoga, " If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be."

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