This is a moment resonant with ironies its manufacturers can’t — or won’t — spot. Between Rishi Sunak taking reins of 10 Downing Street and Sonia Gandhi giving up helmsmanship of 24 Akbar Road, a league of Indians blinded to paradoxical preferences and prejudices has picked itself out yet again.

Prime Minister Sunak has become a chest-thumping cause celebre on our shores by dint of being a diasporic Indian whose journey is post-marked over three generations at no location that is Indian — Gujranwala (now in Pakistan), datelines in Kenya and Tanzania, and then Southampton on southern shores of England. Marriage into the Infosys Narayanamurthys probably makes for a more tactile, and current, India connect.

Sonia, by contrast, has remained a humiliated and hounded entity for all the years that she has steadfastly embraced India — personally as wife, daughter-in-law and mother to two children, politically as an unstinted espouser of the core values of the Indian Constitution. The journey hasn’t been easy; the price has often been too heavy to pay — two of her immediate family brutally assassinated, she herself viciously targeted.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge with party leaders Sonia Gandhi and Shashi Tharoor in New Delhi on Wednesday. PTI picture

Sunak, for all his palpable and overwrought Britishness — and why not, for he is British — is being hailed as “Indian”; light a Diwali diya, feed a cow and, lo and behold, it’s raining “jai mata dis”. Forget the little detail of his advocacy of beef farmers who populate his north Yorkshire constituency of Richmond. Forget who he has swiftly reappointed as boss of his home office; Suella Braverman, her own “Indian origins” quite apart, is the farthest thing to being popular, among immigrants especially.

Sonia, for all her adoption and assimilation of India, from the privacy of family to the public stage she continues to bear on, has been slandered in language that does not bear repetition here. When she led the UPA to an unlikely victory in 2004 and the prime ministership of India was hers to have, a most vitriolic ultranationalist melodrama came to confront her. Such that she quickly thought the better of it and handed the crown to Manmohan Singh, arguably the most erudite and effacing of India’s Prime Ministers.

It was a momentous era that Sonia signed off on this afternoon, no less because she stood at the summit of India’s oldest political party through success and through failure, and in gracious defiance of the muck that routinely flew into her face.

Few had expected in 2004 that a beleaguered widow at the head of a ramshackle encampment would overcome the unassailable Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his mesmeric spell on the nation.

But Sonia’s Congress managed to give the lie to Vajpayee’s “Shining India” claim and returned for a decade’s stint in power.

It was to be, for the better part, an exemplar spell of informed and engaged governance. But there was a bitter part to it, tainted with real and perceived lapses, overridden and eventually drowned by a clamour the UPA never appeared able to credibly counter.

Sonia headed the Congress for six of the last eight years, through consistent political diminishment and through failing health. When Rahul Gandhi quit the presidentship after the battering of 2019 and resolved not to return to the job, it was her turn once again at the wobbled wheel.

It was perhaps to be expected that she said she felt a sense of being relaxed as she handed the baton to Mallikarjun Kharge, the newly elected party chief. “I did what I could in accordance with my ability,” she told her party, making quick and crisp work of her departure, “I have to say I am feeling relieved and light.”

But she wasn’t going to walk off without reminding her folks of the tasks that remain and need urgent attention. “There are lots of challenges before the party, and the biggest is how to confront the huge challenge to democratic principles…. The Congress has faced many crises before, but we never gave up. We have to move ahead full of purpose and united, and emerge successful.”

Just how, she didn’t spell out. What lay in it for Sonia today was a sense of being liberated, a sense she articulated as a sigh. “I am being unburdened,” she said. It cannot be that she wouldn’t have been conscious of the slurs that have slapped her all these years as she said that.

And as the applause rings out to Sunak’s ascension in London and as Sonia steps down quite unheralded, another irony is afloat that is perhaps of note.

“I will remember your love and your respect till the last breath of my life,” is how Sonia Gandhi signed off. She could have said better. Or worse.