Months before the Congress-led alliance won the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Sonia Gandhi had already made up her mind about one question that would soon dominate national politics—her prime ministerial ambitions.
In fact, when her children Rahul and Priyanka asked her whether she would accept the post if the party won, her response was emphatic: “Absolutely not!”
In her upcoming memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love, published by HarperCollins India and set to release on Tuesday, the Congress leader has recounted the days and hours leading up to her decision to turn down the country’s top political post.
“Some months before the election, my children and I had discussed the issue of my possible prime ministership. One of them asked me straight out whether I would accept the post, just in case our party pulled off a victory. ‘Absolutely not!’ I’d said, almost indignantly. ‘Are you sure?’ they pressed me. ‘I’m very clear,’ I said emphatically. Neither Rahul nor Priyanka felt that I should become prime minister,” she writes.
She explained that her children’s opposition stemmed from the traumatic experiences they had endured after the assassinations of their grandmother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi, and their father, Rajiv Gandhi.
“They’d lived through the trauma of their grandmother’s assassination and the brutal murder of their father. In their minds, holding that office was intrinsically linked with heightened danger. They looked relieved and I, too, felt lighter, having said my views out loud on the question for the first time,” she writes.
Sonia says she kept her views to herself during the election campaign because the Congress was fighting for survival and she did not want a leadership struggle to emerge within the party. “We were in a battle for our survival and I had to keep my party together, to face our foes head-on as a cohesive team. It wasn’t an option to allow a leadership struggle to arise between the contenders in our party,” she writes.
She also believed that the person who took forward the legacy of previous Congress governments should have considerable experience in governance and an impeccable record of integrity.
Alliance Leaders Put Pressure
The issue resurfaced after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) secured victory in the 2004 elections. Sonia writes that she found herself torn between her personal reservations and what she believed was her responsibility towards the party and voters.
“One part of me rejected the idea completely, the other part was calling on my sense of obligation—towards the party workers who’d be hurt and disappointed by my refusal, but also to the people who’d given us their vote. My emotions were changing, moment to moment. One minute I was clear, the next, I was torn,” she writes.
When alliance leaders gathered at her residence to persuade her to accept the post, Sonia says she listened silently for over an hour before telling them her decision.
What followed, according to her account, was an intense confrontation. “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,” she writes.
The leaders, she says, immediately began congratulating her, believing she had agreed to become prime minister.
But her daughter Priyanka had witnessed the exchange from outside the conference room window. Sonia writes that Priyanka felt her mother was being “browbeaten into acceptance” and rushed to find Rahul.
When the two confronted her, Sonia told them: “I don’t want to do it, you know I don’t. I was being pressurised.” Rahul was furious, asking: “Pressurised? You are being pressurised? What about us?”
Priyanka, meanwhile, reminded her mother of the decision she had taken months earlier. “Look, Ma, you’ve always been clear about this,” she told her. “Don’t get forced into it. Do what you’ve decided to do. We’re both here to help you handle it.”
Sonia writes that she was left questioning what she had done and whether her actions could have far-reaching consequences for the party and the country.
‘How Could I Agree?’
Another major consideration was the political controversy surrounding her Italian origin. Sonia believed the BJP and its allies would continue to use the issue to stir emotions if she accepted the post.
“The BJP and its allies would for certain use my ‘foreign origin’ as an issue, they would stir up emotions and create havoc that would subsume every other good—of the past, and of the coming years. How could I agree to holding the office of prime minister knowing it could wound my country, the country that I loved? No, never!” she writes.
She also describes an emotional night of introspection, during which she weighed her sense of duty towards India against her own reluctance to take up the post.
“I retreated into my bedroom and lay quietly as always on my husband’s side of the bed,” she writes, recalling how two conflicting voices played out in her mind.
One questioned whether it was reasonable for someone born and brought up in Italy to lead a country of more than a billion people. The other reminded her of her bond with India. “This is your country; you owe your whole adult life and allegiance to it. When you lost the man you loved, it took you in its arms as one of its own,” she writes, describing the voice that urged her to accept her responsibility towards the country.
But by the time she was drifting off to sleep, she says, her mind had cleared. “’Sonia, be true to yourself,’ I could hear myself say. ‘You’ve always known it. Just leave it!'”
The following morning, she went to Rahul’s room and told him she had made up her mind. “’I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to stick to my stand,’ I told him. He stepped up to me and with his arms around me said, ‘It’s the right decision’. I felt at peace for the first time since the election results had been declared. No one would be able to sway me now from my purpose,” she writes.
‘Power In Itself Has Never Attracted Me’
Even at the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting, Sonia faced another round of appeals from party colleagues asking her to reconsider. She writes that she had expected to simply deliver her speech and nominate former finance minister Manmohan Singh as her successor.
Instead, one leader after another made speeches urging her to accept the post.
When she finally addressed the gathering, she reiterated that becoming prime minister had never been her ambition. “Throughout these past six years that I have been in politics, one thing has been clear to me. And that is, as I have often stated, that the post of prime minister is not my aim,” she told the gathering.
She continued: “I was always certain that if ever I found myself in the position that I am in today, I would follow my own inner voice. Today that voice tells me I must humbly decline this post.”
The announcement triggered protests from party MPs, some of whom surrounded the lectern and pleaded with her to change her mind. Sonia writes that she had to stop her speech halfway through because she felt faint and was unable to breathe.
When she returned to address the gathering, she explained the conviction behind her decision.
“Power in itself has never attracted me, nor has position been my goal,” she said. “My aim has always been to defend the secular foundation of our nation and the poor of our country—the creed sacred to Indiraji and Rajivji.”
She also made it clear that refusing the prime minister’s post did not mean stepping away from politics or her responsibilities towards the party. “I request you to accept my decision and to recognize that I will not reverse it,” she told the MPs.
Sonia then proposed Manmohan Singh as her successor. He went on to become prime minister, leading the UPA government for two consecutive terms from 2004 to 2014.
The memoir excerpt offers Sonia’s personal account of one of the defining political decisions of her career—a decision she says she had made long before the election results came in, despite the pressure from alliance leaders and her own party colleagues to take the country’s highest political office.
