Sonia Gandhi declines the Prime Minister's post — and Manmohan Singh gets it instead

The Congress-led alliance's win over the incumbent Vajpayee government in the May 2004 Lok Sabha election was a genuine upset, and Sonia Gandhi — Congress president and the presumptive Prime Minister — was set to be sworn in. Opposition BJP figures, including Sushma Swaraj, had campaigned against a foreign-born Prime Minister in the election's final days, and the question of her Italian birth continued to dog the transition.

On 19 May 2004, at a meeting of Congress MPs, Sonia Gandhi announced she would not take the post, saying she was following her “inner voice,” and broke down while declining the nomination. The party had to settle on an alternative quickly.

The choice was Manmohan Singh — the economist who, as Finance Minister under P. V. Narasimha Rao from 1991, had overseen India's economic liberalisation, but who had never won a Lok Sabha election and sat in Parliament only as a Rajya Sabha member. He was sworn in as Prime Minister on 22 May 2004, going on to serve two full terms, through 2014, with Sonia Gandhi remaining Congress president and chairperson of the UPA coalition throughout.