NEW DELHI: Congress leader Sonia Gandhi’s long-awaited memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, will be published on November 10, publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced on Tuesday, offering a candid account of her journey from post-war Italy to the heart of Indian politics.
At 19, while studying in Cambridge, England, Sonia met Rajiv Gandhi in 1965. Her life subsequently unfolded within the Nehru-Gandhi family, first largely away from politics and later at its centre. The memoir traces her transition from a private family life to public duty, shaped, she says, by grief and loss.
“It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” Gandhi said in a statement issued through Knopf. The narrative is set against some of the most turbulent chapters in India’s post-Independence history. It recounts the death of Rajiv’s younger brother Sanjay Gandhi in a 1980 plane crash, Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her bodyguards in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by an LTTE suicide bomber during an election campaign in Tamil Nadu in 1991.
According to the publisher, the memoir also offers a portrait of Sonia Gandhi’s early years in India, learning Hindi, adapting to Indian customs and cuisine, and raising her children with Rajiv while living in the Prime Minister’s residence in New Delhi. Sonia Gandhi says the book seeks to move beyond the political mythology surrounding one of India’s most powerful families.
“Much has been written about my family, but few narratives were able to reach into the truth of their motivations, their actions and even their very human failings,” she said. “In many ways, this book is a homage to their humanness.” Her own political career, which she initially resisted, eventually made her the longest-serving president of the Congress. The decisive chapter came after the 2004 general election, when Congress emerged as the largest party and formed the United Progressive Alliance. Gandhi led the alliance but declined the prime minister’s post, with Manmohan Singh becoming prime minister. The UPA subsequently governed India for a decade.
Gandhi said writing the memoir required confronting experiences she had long kept private. “Writing about my life did not come easily to me. It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside,” she said.
The memoir, she added, ultimately revealed a connecting thread of “love and loyalty” running from her childhood in Italy to her decades in India. “My story also offers readers a unique perspective of the social and political changes I have witnessed for six decades in the beautiful country of my belonging,” Sonia Gandhi said.