Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, arrived at Sonia Gandhi's Delhi residence at the weekend to greet his party's leader with a congratulatory bunch of red flowers.
He also arrived with his own personal mandate to rule. As the votes in India's parliamentary election were counted, the senior bureaucrat blossomed into a political leader with the overwhelming backing of the world's largest democracy.
Mr Singh had been seen as Mrs Gandhi's appointee for the past five years, a capable but non-threatening stand-in after she turned down the job of prime minister following the Congress party victory in 2004. A respected economist and former finance minister, Mr Singh found it difficult to shed a professorial image. His opponents taunted him as politically ingénu.