Every memoir by a politician is a quiet act of statecraft, if not of wordsmithery. Winston Churchill is said to have joked that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it himself, and leaders ever since have taken the hint. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his autobiography in a colonial prison and turned confinement into the founding text of a nation’s idea of itself.
A political memoir is never mere remembering. It is a curated archive in which the author decides what is recalled, what is reframed and what is left to gather dust. In a dynasty the stakes are higher still, for the book defends a lineage rather than a life, and is written as much for the heir as for the reader.
Sonia Gandhi’s Belonging: A Journey of Love, released last week, belongs squarely in that tradition. Her preface calls it “a personal memoir”, one for which politics is the background, a kind of framework that turns out to be a loaded political tornado. A woman who says she has stepped back from active politics has delivered the season’s most combustible political document and set Indian politics on fire. A more honest title would have been Belonging: A Saga of Love, Agony and Acrimony.
The book deserves its due. The love story is beautifully written. It opens on a single image, a young man “tall and handsome with deep black eyes” across the room in the varsity, a Greek restaurant in Cambridge and the only place in town in the mid-1960s serving food somewhat Italian.
What follows has the warmth of a private album opened at last: white tablecloths, Luigi the waiter who could predict every order, and parents in Italy certain that a long separation would make the young lovers drift apart. The agony arrives in two devastating incidents. The first took place with Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984.
Second occurred when with Rajiv was killed on May 21, 1991. Sifting through what came back from that night, she finds the family photographs he always carried and a bag with the clothes he had changed out of: “I bend over it, seeking to inhale the elusive scent of my beloved, gone forever.” When the press dubbed her the Sphinx of 10 Janpath, she writes simply: “My Rajiv was gone, nothing else mattered.” Few Indian political memoirs have rendered private loss with such ache.
Then the widow gives way to the prosecutor, and grief gives way to grievance. The Emergency, the family’s original sin, is handled with surgical care. Sanjay’s name, she writes, “had become synonymous with the Emergency”. Indira discovers that “actions of serious import were being taken without her knowledge” and comes to see that “keeping him in check would have prevented much of the damage that ensued”.
Rajiv is the conscience of the house, told by his mother, “Your instinct is right, Rajiv.” Lest anyone miss the point, he “had nothing to do with the Emergency”. Maneka, drawn harsher still, was “egging him on”. The design is unmistakable: the elder couple is lifted out of the frame of 1975-77, while the younger couple is left holding the blame.
The same protective prose describes 1984. The anti-Sikh carnage is “a tragic and shameful chapter” but the system had “perhaps even broken down”, Rajiv’s “heart held no bigotry or rancour” and he “could not in any way have authorised those heinous acts”. Certainty is not evidence. His “when a big tree falls” remark which has haunted the Congress for four decades, is nowhere in the book.
On Shah Bano, she stages a wife’s cross-examination, “Why are you letting this happen?” And then accepts that the compromise “did in fact strike a balance”. Overturning a Supreme Court verdict to placate the clergy shrinks to “a political step that was widely criticised” though it fed the Hindu backlash and the Ayodhya mobilisation that polarised politics for a generation.
The pattern is consistent: anyone who stood in the dynasty’s way is diminished or demonised by accusation or by omission. V P Singh, the man who broke with Rajiv, is charged with withdrawing his SPG cover without the threat review a committee had required sending the message that “Rajiv’s safety was of no concern”.
For Sonia, Bofors becomes an opposition offensive “supported by a corporate house and some within the Congress” so that betrayal, not the guns deal, becomes the story. Ottavio Quattrocchi is never named. Narasimha Rao gets a polite paragraph as an “erudite statesman” but in her telling of Babri the demolition belongs to the “BJP-RSS” alone and his government is never named. Sitaram Kesri simply “was made to step down”, a passive voice that carries the whole 1998 coup that crowned Sonia sweetened by her touching his feet that same afternoon. The silences speak loudest.
On September 27, 2013, Rahul Gandhi walked into a Congress press conference and called an ordinance cleared by his own government’s Cabinet “complete nonsense” that should be “torn up and thrown away”, while Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister Sonia herself had chosen, was abroad. Montek Singh Ahluwalia later revealed that a humiliated Singh asked him whether he should resign. The episode is absent, yet the book calls the grounds of Rahul’s 2023 conviction “outlandish” and mourns his expulsion from Parliament under the very rule that ordinance had sought to soften.
Godhra, too, is airbrushed. The Sabarmati Express fire that killed 59 pilgrims gets one sentence and its cause “disputed”, though a special court convicted 31 people in 2011. These are not oversights. They reveal whom the book is written to protect.
If the timing was meant to rekindle the Congress’s secular credentials and put the BJP on the defensive, it has done the opposite. Within a day, BJP leaders were asking why her tears flow for Babri but runs dry for Godhra, and reducing her Emergency account to a feud between a native younger sister-in-law and a foreign-born elder one, reviving the foreign-origin debate in a single barb.
The Emergency, the 1984 Sikh killings, Shah Bano, Bofors and Muslim appeasement are back in the narrative. Worse, the book hands the BJP its most durable charge: that the Congress is the Gandhis and the Gandhis are the Congress. In a story where every hero is family and every failure belongs to an outsider, that charge proves itself. Rahul Gandhi, who must lead the party into 2029, inherits not only a legacy but a curated manuscript.
Belonging succeeds magnificently as a love story and as a testament to grief. As history, it is a brief for the defence, written by the defendant’s family. As politics, it may prove that the most dangerous book a leader can write is one that reminds the country of everything she hoped it had forgotten.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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