Rahul Gandhi has been appointed by his  mother Sonia to a committee looking after the affairs of India's ruling  Congress party. Photograph: Raveendran/APP/QUETTA
                        Rahul Gandhi, the crown prince of Indian politics, took a step  nearer to power on Thursday  when it was announced that his mother  Sonia, the leader of the ruling Congress party, had suddenly gone abroad  for medical reasons and charged the 41-year-old with running the  organisation in her absence.
The country immediately plunged into a frenzy of speculation about the nature of the 64-year-old Sonia Gandhi's condition and whether her departure meant the beginning of the long awaited transfer of power to her son.
Though  Gandhi holds no official executive position, she is widely viewed as  immensely powerful. Her son is a member of parliament and head of the  Congress party's youth wing, which has run India  for much of the last seven decades. Along with a senior aide, a party  spokesman and the current defence minister, Rahul Gandhi will now be  temporarily responsible for the administration of the single most  powerful entity in Indian politics.
"Rahul in charge" was the headline running on the local New Delhi television channel.
Janardhan  Dwivedi, who will sit with Rahul on the committee, said Sonia Gandhi  had been recently diagnosed with a medical condition and, on the advice  of her doctors, had travelled abroad for surgery.
"She will be away for two or three weeks. She has constituted a group to look after party affairs in her absence," Diwedi said.
Her  son is a controversial figure in India. He never gives interviews and  shuns the febrile Indian political media circuit, preferring to build a  political career through his work as a party organiser and through  spectacular public appearances which opponents dismiss as stunts.
In  recent months Rahul Gandhi has been arrested after driving on a  motorbike around communities of farmers protesting against land seizures  on the outskirts of Delhi and walked 50 miles over four days in the  summer heat in a remote part of northern India on a trip to "meet the  real people" of India. He slept and ate in modest homes.
On a  recent visit to Mumbai, Gandhi outmanoeuvred local rightwing groups who  opposed his presence in the city by shunning the large and disruptive  motorcade preferred by Indian politicians in favour of the overcrowded  public trains to reach the city from the airport.
Such actions  have successfully raised Gandhi's profile and appear to have  consolidated popular support among rural voters, a key constituency for  Congress.
Tikam Singh, a 40-year-old farmer from the village of  Gujran Atta, Uttar Pradesh, met Gandhi earlier this summer during the  violent land protests. Singh said the politician "understood that the  lands are being taken away forcibly".
"He has said that he is with  us. He shared roti [bread] and daal [lentil curry] with us. We are with  him because at least he is someone who is there for us. Rahul-ji was  very understanding," Singh said, using the honorific "ji" after Gandhi's  first name.
However, Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Hindu,  said that the real importance was not that Rahul Gandhi had been  nominated but that Sonia Gandhi might be ailing.
"The timing of  this announcement means she is telling us whose hands she wants the  party to be in should she be no longer in a position to run things," he  said.
Some analysts have even raised the possibility that Sonia  Gandhi might not return to politics, though Congress party officials  said there was "totally, absolutely no question" of any immediate  retirement.
Rahul Gandhi is the great-grandson of Jawaharlal  Nehru, who led India after independence, the grandson of Indira Gandhi,  who ruled India from 1966 to 1977, and the son of former prime minister  Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 1991. His parents  met at Cambridge University.
Politics in India remains deeply  dynastic and many within Congress view Rahul Gandhi as the only figure  capable of leading the party to a third successive electoral victory in  2014. The current administration, under the ageing Manmohan Singh, has  been overwhelmed by corruption scandals and increasing economic  problems.