Since the day Papa left, I have watched you face everything life threw at you with never-ending courage and dignity.” Rahul Gandhi’s tribute to his mother on Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary was affectionate, but it carried a tantalising promise. “Only Priyanka and I really know what you have been through, and how difficult your life after Papa truly was,” he wrote.
Now, for perhaps the first time, Sonia Gandhi will tell that story herself. Her memoir, “Belonging: A Journey of Love”, is due to be published in November. For someone who has spent much of her public life carefully controlling what she reveals, the book is likely to reopen some of the most familiar—and least settled—questions about the Gandhi family: what happened inside the family after Rajiv’s assassination? Why Sonia resisted politics? What really lay behind her decision to turn down the PM’s job in 2004?
There may also be more intimate revelations. Sonia has rarely spoken at length about the private years of her marriage, widowhood and motherhood, or about the people and friendships that remained after successive political tragedies. She has spent decades preserving the family’s history. This time, she is part of the record.
She came to India as Sonia Maino, met Rajiv Gandhi in Cambridge and married him in 1968. Politics was already woven into the family she married into, but it was not the life she wanted for herself. How she experienced that transformation—from a young Italian woman marrying into India’s most famous political family to a widow who eventually became its political centre—is one of the stories the memoir will have to illuminate.
Then came the deaths. Sanjay Gandhi died in 1980. Indira was assassinated in 1984. Rajiv was killed in 1991. In little more than a decade, Sonia was left to raise Rahul and Priyanka, while trying to keep a private life separate from the politics that had consumed the family.
For years, she resisted the Congress’s demands that she enter politics. When she finally did so in 1998 and became party president, it was after watching the organisation weaken and the political landscape around it change dramatically.
The Congress-led alliance had unexpectedly won the election in 2004. Sonia was expected to become prime minister. Instead, she refused. “The post of prime minister is not my aim,” she told the Congress Parliamentary Party. “Today, that voice tells me I must humbly decline this post.” Manmohan Singh became prime minister. Sonia remained Congress president and chaired UPA.
Her decision did not remove her from power. It changed the nature of it. For the next decade, she had to manage a formidable cast of regional leaders and senior Congress politicians, each with political histories, constituencies and ambitions of their own. The coalition could easily have fractured. Sonia was not known for flamboyant political conversation or grand public performances. She listened, negotiated and waited. Coalition politics arguably suited that temperament.
Later, she watched the political ground shift steadily against her party. The rise of Narendra Modi culminated in the 2014 election, when the Congress was reduced to just 44 Lok Sabha seats. Sonia continued to argue for secularism, pluralism and a conception of India that could not be reduced to one political or religious identity. But those arguments increasingly placed the Congress on the defensive.
In subsequent years, the Gandhi family name kept alive the idea of a Congress revival. Sonia protected Rahul and Priyanka from politics for years. Eventually both entered it. The family name survived into another generation. Sonia’s memoir may reveal something about this transition.
But the questions around her remain. What did she believe power was for? How much of her politics came from the Congress tradition she inherited? Was the 2004 refusal of the prime minister’s office an act of conviction, political instinct or caution? How did she see the relations between herself and Manmohan Singh?
For years, Sonia Gandhi kept the family record for everyone else. In November, she will finally add her own version to it.