Sarko and the Gandhi connection

As President Nicolas Sarkozy packs his bags for his first visit to India at the end of the week, Indian newspaper columnists are falling over themselves to cover the potential dilomatic embarrassment of an unmarried man visiting with his live-in girlfriend - assuming recent reports of a secret wedding at the Elysee are groundless - when in India unmarried couples are still a rarity.

Feverish reports have included one from the Hundu's Paris correspondent claiming that Sarkozy wants to declare his marriage to Carla Bruni at the Taj Mahal, the monument to love built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Other journalists say the phone lines have been humming between Delhi and Paris: How do we address her? Do we give them a double room?

Only Shobhan Saxena, writing in the Times of India, has raised the spectre of Mahatma Gandhi in an effort to explain the media fascination with the visiting Frenchman and his younger girlfriend. "A young eye candy dangling from the arms of a wrinkling face of a powerful man always raises eyebrows," Saxena writes. "There is always a hint of a scandal in this kind of arrangement. Even the Mahatma [Gandhi] scandalised a lot of people as he slept with naked young women in his laboratory of brahamacharya. Though Gandhi, at 77, was quite open about his experiments with teenaged girls, many people were sickened by it and heaped scorn on him."

Saxena is referring to Gandhi's habit in later years of sleeping between two naked teenaged girls - one of them his own great-niece, Manu - in order to 'test' his vow of brahamacharya or chastity. The French President has made many claims about his relationship with Carla in recent weeks; celibacy, however, has not been mentioned so far.