Sonia Gandhi returns to India, is 'doing well'

Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday returned home after a week-long visit abroad for a routine medical check-up.

"She (Gandhi) has come back this morning after her routine medical check-up and all the reports are perfectly all right," said All India Congress Committee general secretary Janardan Dwivedi.

This was the third visit abroad of Gandhi, 65, in connection with the surgery she underwent in August last year for an undisclosed ailment.

She had left the country on September 2 for the check-ups.

After her surgery in August 2010, Gandhi had again gone abroad for her first six-monthly check up in the last week of February this year.

A four-member team of Congress leaders including Defence Minister A K Antony, Rahul Gandhi, the Congress President's political secretary Ahmed Patel and Janardan Dwivedi was constituted to look after the party work.

However, no such arrangement was made during her last two week-long visits abroad for the medical check ups this year.

A year after the Congress party president first travelled abroad for medical treatment, sources familiar with the medical team treating her at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital said Gandhi is fully cured of cancer.

Gandhi had suddenly left New Delhi in August 2011, leaving her party colleagues and most ministers baffled about her medical condition.

She returned a month later, and has since appeared in good health during her public appearances and in the Lok Sabha, where she made an unusually angry intervention after Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani's speech at the onset of the monsoon session of Parliament in August.

In February this year, she again travelled abroad, presumably for follow-up treatment, though Congress sources were mum about her precise affliction.

The sources at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital were understandably reluctant to speak to the media, insisting that the doctors treating Gandhi would not be interviewed on a patient's condition.

Gandhi, the sources insisted, is fine; the cancer has been arrested and happily not spread elsewhere.

Doctors at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital, one of the finest hospitals in the world, are understood to have conducted other tests on the Congress leader, who is also chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, to rule out any future medical problems.