Gandhi said she felt "uneasy" with the superpower label increasingly attached to India and the "hegemony ... power politics, military might, conflict" associated with it.
"That's not what we have been all about through the centuries and it certainly is not what I would like India to become," she told a Hindustan Times conference under the banner "India: The next global superpower".
The head of the United Progressive Alliance coalition that runs India recalled how India's independence hero Mahatma Gandhi, "mocked as a half-naked fakir from India by the British, took on the superpower of the day through the mere force of his values and ideas."
"Why should we think of ourselves as a global superpower? Why not instead work towards becoming a global power for peace, prosperity and progress?" said Gandhi, the widow of assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
"We should not get too obsessed with acquiring superpower status. More and more successes will come our way, they are bound to come our way. They will surely give us the global role that we seek and that we are perfectly equipped to fulfil.
"But we must also concentrate on the basics that still elude lakhs and lakhs (hundreds and hundreds of thousands) of our less privileged and less advantaged countrymen and women."
If India was to be a superpower, it would be "in the true Indian sense", Gandhi added.
She said she was "proud" of India's economic performance, with Gross Domestic Product growing at more than eight percent a year.
But the Congress leader underlined the "painful contrasts" in a land of "dazzling prosperity ... and dehumanising poverty."
"We have large sections of our society that have yet to enjoy even the basics of a decent quality of life," she said.
"The successes that we have recorded must not lead to false illusions of grandeur and power ... India's standing in the world will be determined by the extent to which the weaker sections of our society lead a life of security and dignity."
And she warned that if "tangible benefits do not improve soon enough to our people from the changes that are occurring, they will reject our policies."
In a country of "such deprivation", Gandhi also called for "a little less conspicuous consumption" among the wealthy and "those of us in public life".
Since India liberalised its economy from 1991, some of the growing numbers of rich have adopted a very public millionaire's lifestyle.
Gandhi noted that fewer than 80,000 Indians out of a population of 1.1 billion declared annual income of more than 800,000 rupees (18,000 dollars).
The Italian-born Congress leader, who spurned the premiership after her party scored an upset election victory in 2004, urged the rich to be more philanthropic and cited the example of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2006