Jaipur, January 20
Acknowledging that the party bestowed a “huge honour” in appointing him the vice-president, Rahul Gandhi today laid bare his inner feelings, confessing that while everyone was congratulating him on his elevation, his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi cried last night.

“Everybody congratulated me but last night my mother came to my room and she cried. Why did she cry? She cried because she understands that the power so many people seek is actually a poison. She can see it .What it does to a people around and to the people they love but the most important that she can see it. She not attached to it, the only antidote to this poison is for all of us to see it is not become attached to it,” he told the All-India Congress Committee at the BM Birla Auditorium.

Many, including his mother Sonia Gandhi, had moist eyes after the young leader shared his feelings on taking on greater responsibility and his views on hope and power. He later embraced Sonia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hugged him while the entire assembly gave him a standing ovation.

As for hope, Rahul said he realised when he saw his father Rajiv Gandhi address the Nation the evening after his mother Indira Gandhi was assassinated in October, 1984. “I knew like me he was broken inside and even like me he was terrified of what lay in front of him but when he spoke that night I felt a glimmer of hope. It was like a small ray of light in a dark sky. I can still remember what it felt like. The next day, I realised that many people had seen it. Today, as I look back, and I have a political career of 8 years in 42 years, I can see it was a small ray of hope in the darkness that helped change India into what it is today. Without hope you cannot achieve anything. You can have plans, you can have ideas, but unless you have hope you cannot change anything.”

Rahul said as a young boy he loved playing badminton, taught by two policemen who were his friends and guarded his grandmother Indira Gandhi. “The game taught me balance in a complicated world but then one day they killed her and took away the balance in my life. I felt pain that I never felt before,” said Rahul.