Congress Parliamentary Party Chief and Rajya Sabha MP Sonia Gandhi is set to open up about her personal and political journey in her memoir ‘Belonging:
A Journey of Love’, which will be published on November 10, Alfred A. Knopf announced on Tuesday. The memoir promises to chronicle Sonia Gandhi’s journey from her childhood in post-war Italy to India, her marriage to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, her relationship with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her eventual entry into politics. Describing the memoir, Sonia Gandhi said much had been written about her family, but few accounts had been able to capture the truth of their motivations, actions and “very human failings”. "In many ways, this book is a homage to their humanness,” she said in a statement issued through Knopf. Sonia Gandhi said the memoir would also offer readers her perspective on the social and political transformation she witnessed in India over six decades. "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,” she said. The book traces her life from her childhood in a small town in Italy to her meeting Rajiv Gandhi in Cambridge in 1965, when she was 19. She later moved to India after marrying Rajiv Gandhi and became part of the Nehru-Gandhi family. According to the book description released by Penguin, the memoir will offer an intimate account of Sonia Gandhi’s relationship with Rajiv Gandhi and her introduction to his mother, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It will also revisit some of the most traumatic moments in the family’s history — including the death of Sanjay Gandhi in a plane crash, Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by a suicide bomber in 1991. Sonia Gandhi said it was the personal tragedies in her life that eventually pushed her into politics. "It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” she said. She also acknowledged that writing about her life was not an easy process. "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,” Sonia Gandhi said. The memoir will also trace her eventual entry into active politics, her rise within the Congress and her tenure as the party’s longest-serving president. One of the key chapters is expected to focus on her decision to decline the Prime Minister’s post after the Congress-led alliance emerged victorious in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, choosing instead to lead the alliance that governed India for the next decade. Looking back at her journey, Sonia Gandhi said that as she gradually stepped away from the political sphere, she began to recognise a common thread running through her life. “Yet as I gradually removed myself from the political sphere and looked back at all I had seen, the thread of love and loyalty that wove through my story began to define itself,” she said. She described that journey as stretching “from the simplicity of my childhood in small-town Italy, to the complexity of my years in India as the wife of Rajiv Gandhi and the daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.” Penguin describes Belonging as an “epic yet intimate” account that offers a unique lens on India’s post-Independence history, its political struggles and its social and economic transformation over six decades.
