Former Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s much-awaited memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, hit the stands on Tuesday, instantly setting off political debates on social media and on television channels. However, contrary to the buzz, the book has few big revelations.
Most of it, in fact, is about her life before she became a politician. The period after 2004, the year she led the grand old party to victory in the Lok Sabha elections, is covered only in passing.
Political geeks will have to strain themselves to find passages that satiate their curiosity. But there is a lot in the memoir for discerning readers willing to read between the lines. The omissions by the author speak volumes too.
For example, the name of actor Amitabh Bachchan, once a close friend of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, appears just three times in the book. His wife, Jaya Bachchan, is not mentioned at all. The Bachchans are said to have fallen out with the Gandhis after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
The other Bachchans
Notably, though, Sonia Gandhi makes several references to Amitabh Bachchan’s parents, the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Teji Bachchan, in whose home she stayed when she first came to India from Italy in 1968.
The couple were friends of her mother-in-law, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and have been described as generous hosts.
Teji Bachchan took care of Sonia Gandhi when she fell sick and gave her several gifts over the years, including a puppy after she lost her firstborn son within hours of his birth. Harivansh Rai Bachchan offered her occasional Hindi lessons as well as sage advice during her early days in Delhi.
“You must know, Sonia beti, child, that in this country it is not what you are that counts, it is what people think you to be,” he is supposed to have told her at the time.
“This warning invariably left me wondering – does he mean that I can never be myself? I was I, and that’s the way I was; how could I possibly show myself differently? So it was that on many occasions, after being dropped back by Rajiv, I’d shed some quiet tears and long for my home and my family. Rajiv tried to reassure me. But in later years I remembered Uncle Bachchan’s words. How right he’d been – a poet and a sensitive man, having himself experienced the fickleness of the public.”
Political opponents
Even those who Sonia Gandhi has opposed bitterly in the political arena for years are either not mentioned at all or discussed only briefly. For example, the book contains no references to her interactions with the veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Lal Krishna Advani. Home Minister Amit Shah does not feature either.
However, there is a marked difference in how Sonia Gandhi describes her interactions with former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She writes that she felt concern for Vajpayee when there was a terror attack on Parliament in 2001.
“My immediate thought was for the prime minister’s safety and I rang him at once. I felt relieved when he assured me that he had left the Lok Sabha more or less at the same time as I had; he was at home and secure… I heard afterwards that the prime minister had told many of his colleagues appreciatively that I had been the first to call him.”
Recollecting a heated exchange with Vajpayee during a special session of Parliament from 2002, she expresses regret for having criticised him too harshly.
“I observed in Parliament a few months later that Prime Minister Vajpayee had aged visibly and was looking far from well; his party was whispering about it, too, and soon an article appeared in Time magazine with details of his ailments. I replayed to myself the joint session scene in Central Hall… I thought I’d gone a bit too far; he was a veteran leader, and though we belonged to opposing ideologies, he was the prime minister, and I should have been more moderate in criticising him.”
In contrast, she is cold about her relationship with Modi.
“To this day, I’ve had practically no real contact with him. We meet at semi-official gatherings – for instance, at the end of every Parliament session, when leaders of the major parties customarily gather at the Speaker’s chamber. It’s a very small room, and usually many people are present, but when he comes face-to-face with me, we greet each other with a formal namaste… He tends to look away, avoiding eye contact…
When speaking in Parliament, he at times uses the same coarse language he employs in addressing a public rally. Much of the time he derides the opposition in what can only be termed a tirade.”
Imposing Emergency
Sonia Gandhi’s memoirs acknowledge the excesses committed during the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi suspended fundamental rights from 1975 to 1977. But she also offers readers a glimpse of what her mother-in-law was worried about in those days.
“Mujibur Rahman [prime minister of Bangladesh at the time] and his whole family, including a small boy of nine, had been brutally killed in his own home…
The choice of the date for the massacre was also curious – our Independence Day. While mourning Mujib and his family, Mrs. Gandhi could not overlook the possibility of a similar fate for herself and her family.”
She goes on to allege that Indira Gandhi suspected that trade union leader George Fernandes, among the many opposition politicians imprisoned during the Emergency, was conspiring to assassinate her. Fernandes would later go on to serve as defence minister in Vajpayee’s government.
The other takeaway from this section of the book is that in Sonia Gandhi’s view, part of the blame for the Emergency’s excesses lay with her brother-in-law, Sanjay Gandhi, and his wife, Maneka Gandhi.
“What is undeniable, however, is that he [Sanjay Gandhi] had a significant role in decision-making during the Emergency period, despite lacking a constitutional locus standi for some of his political interventions…
The role of Maneka, too, was worrying my mother-in-law, who felt that, rather than being a sobering influence on Sanjay, she was egging him on in his activities, even interfering in them. She had said to Cabinet Secretary PN Dhar about her young daughter-in-law: “Uske abhi se par nikalne lage hain.” (“She has started growing wings already.”)”
Her husband Rajiv Gandhi, on the other hand, is presented as someone who cautioned his mother about imposing Emergency and later tried to convey to her that Indians were growing resentful of it.
Babri Masjid demolition
It is a pattern that stretches to her description of Rajiv Gandhi’s handling of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, which eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya.
The Hindutva campaign to have a temple to the deity Ram constructed at the site of the mosque had picked up steam during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister. He has long been criticised for failing to thwart it. In fact, it was under his government that the locks to the mosque were opened and Hindu worshippers were allowed access to the mosque.
But Sonia Gandhi’s narration, predictably, does not apportion to him any responsibility for the events followed.
“Rajiv’s aim had been to find a negotiated solution that would be legal and acceptable to all parties involved in the dispute: to let the temple be built without disturbing the mosque… Rajiv’s attempt to revive Mahatma Gandhi’s alternative conception of a ‘Ram Rajya,’ with its core ideals of virtue, morality, and justice, fell on deaf ears.”
Rajiv Gandhi lost his prime ministership in 1989. Two years later, he was assassinated by a terrorist from the Sri Lankan group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Babri Masjid was demolished by a Hindutva mob a little over a year after his death.
Taking over Congress
For years, Sonia Gandhi’s opponents have accused her of being unfair to veteran Congress leader Sitaram Kesri, whom she abruptly replaced as party president in 1998. Kesri came from Bihar and belonged to an Other Backward Class community, which adds greater political significance to the charge.
Still, she addresses the issue only perfunctorily in the book.
“The Congress Working Committee decided unanimously that a change of leadership was necessary. Congress President Sitaram Kesri was made to step down and on March 14, 1998, I was elected president in his place. Kesri-ji, as I addressed him, had been an active Congressman for more than six decades; on an impulse I drove directly from the meeting to his house, greeted him, and bent down to touch his feet, as one does as a mark of respect to elders. He was taken aback by my unexpected appearance but gave me his blessing, placing his hand on my head with tears in his eyes.”
No, Yes, No and Manmohan Singh
Several of the excerpts published in the media show how Sonia Gandhi declined to become prime minister after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. But, for a brief moment, she had agreed to take up the job before passing it on to the economist-turned-politician Manmohan Singh.
“A meeting is going on with some of the leaders of the alliance in Rajiv’s conference room at the far end of my house. They’ve been talking in turns for over an hour, urging me to agree to their proposal, while I listen silently. As the discussion comes to an end, they look towards me for a response. I muster up as much courage as I can and I say my piece.
There is an uproar amongst them, they stand up and move towards me. I, too, stand up. They physically surround me. “We will not accept this,” one of them says. “You cannot take this decision, Madam,” says another. Their tone is forceful, almost aggressive. “We will not take no for an answer.” I am shaken. I feel overpowered. “Theek hai,” (“All right,”) I mumble almost inaudibly. The assembled leaders don’t even wait for me to finish my sentence, they begin to congratulate me, one by one. “She has agreed, she has agreed,” someone says. I just stand there, numb, unable to say anything further. The leaders depart, satisfied.”
Her children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, intervened at that point and got her to reverse her decision before word could spread. Sonia Gandhi writes that Manmohan Singh was “persuaded to agree” to become prime minister soon after.
Though she lists Singh’s personal qualities and his professional accomplishments, the blunt political rationale behind his selection is stated in the following two sentences.
“Over a period of time, the Congress had been painted as being left of centre, and our government would now be supported by the Communist parties as well. I thought Dr. Manmohan Singh would assuage the doubts of many about our ability to manage and continue the policies that had been begun years ago.”
Identifying with Indira Gandhi
Sonia Gandhi took charge of the Congress three decades after her arrival in India. Before that, she had always maintained that she did not wish to become a politician. Her trajectory in public life makes for a stark contrast to that of Indira Gandhi, who made a series of ambitious moves and even split the original Congress party in order to establish her total control over it.
Yet, in her memoirs, Sonia Gandhi suggests that they had much in common.
“She [Indira Gandhi] confided to us how terrified she had been during her first years as prime minister when called upon to face Parliament, how unnerved when she had to speak or take part in debates. Yet she would strive to put up a calm and composed front – feeling tongue-tied, words refusing to come out, her high-pitched voice compounding her embarrassment. Many of these terrors I was to experience myself years later when I stepped into the political arena.”
Women in politics (and political families)
Not only her mother-in-law, Sonia Gandhi claims to feel strongly for other women in politics too – even those opposed to her party.
“In spite of their being political opponents I admired them and maintained a personal rapport with them, especially with Mamata Banerjee and Kumari Mayawati. All of them were in themselves impressive, hardworking, and politically astute politicians who made their name in what was very much a man’s world.”
This sympathy, she suggests, extends to women who may not have been politicians themselves but married into political families like hers. Two such women, former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita Kejriwal, and Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s wife, Kalpana Soren, find mention towards the end of the book, when she recalls meeting them during the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign.
“I went to the rally in Delhi to meet the wives of the two jailed chief ministers. They had suddenly found themselves compelled to manage their parties; in the Indian political tradition, going back to the Quit India movement when all the leaders of the independence struggle were imprisoned, wives step in at times when their spouses are in jail or beleaguered. I could understand how difficult it must have been for them. As I walked up to the stage, on the spur of the moment, I embraced each of them and spoke a few words of sympathy and encouragement.”
