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In 1998, when Sonia Gandhi took over as president of the Indian National Congress Party, India's oldest political party, she was seen as her country's most improbable politician: a foreigner with a shaky command of Hindi, reclusive to the point of seeming aloof, a wife who had fought to keep her husband from joining politics and who lost him to an assassination.

Now Mrs. Gandhi is credited with having scored a stunning political coup. Her party made its best performance in 25 years in the May 2009 parliamentary elections, picking up 205 of 543 seats on its own and, with its coalition partners, coming only 12 seats shy of an outright majority. To form a government, Mrs. Gandhi needed only to stitch up alliances with a handful of independents and small parties.

No longer is it expected to be beholden to the many small party bosses that it needed during the first five-year term a Congress-led coalition was in office. Most important, for the sake of foreign and economic policy, it would no longer have to rely on India's Communist parties to stay in power, as it had for most of that time.

Mrs. Gandhi is the Italian-born wife of the slain former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the daughter-in-law of the prime minister before him, Indira Gandhi, who was also assassinated. She has said she joined politics to save the legacy of the party, which her husband's family has been associated with since before independence. "I had to accustom myself to the public gaze, which I found intrusive and hard to endure," she said in a speech at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands in 2007.

Critics say she is simply paving the way for her son, Rahul, 38, who is expected to take a cabinet post in the new government.

Under Mrs. Gandhi's leadership, the Congress-led coalition homed in on the rural poor. During its first term, buoyed by robust economic growth, it used record government revenues to increase social spending, not just raising health and education budgets, but also starting an ambitious public works program in the countryside and a costly loan repayment waiver for farmers.

She masterly cast herself as a leader who relinquished power, turning down her party's appeals to become prime minister, first in 2004 and again this time. Instead, she chose Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken economist, and between them they divvied up the job: she took care of the hard-knuckles politics of keeping the coalition together, while he served as the chief executive, albeit one who was always seen as subservient.

Even with a free hand, the Congress-led government will face formidable challenges. India needs to swiftly build roads, highways and power plants; improve public schools and build universities for a swelling young population; and hire nurses and doctors for its feeble public health system.

Most of all, it needs to address its abiding poverty. Despite over a decade of high economic growth in India, 300 million people remain below the poverty line. Large tracts of the country are racked by a Maoist insurgency. And for the first time in years, growth rates have dipped sharply and the deficit has ballooned. Mrs. Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi campaigned on a pledge to expand the public jobs program and deepen food subsidies for the poor. Mother and son face a crucial political challenge as well: how to open access to a party that critics compare to a family-owned company.

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