Sonia Gandhi (née Maino; born 9 December 1946) is an Indian politician. She is the longest serving president of the Indian National Congress, a social democratic political party, which has governed India for most of its post-independence history. She took over as the party leader in 1998, seven years after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, her husband and a former Prime Minister of India, and remained in office until 2017 after serving for twenty-two years.[a] She returned to the post in 2019 and remained the President for another three years.