Sonia Gandhi memoir Belonging: why she didn't want Rajiv to be PM

Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, went on sale across India on Tuesday, 10 November. The 544-page book, published by HarperCollins India, tells the story of the Italian-born woman who married into India’s most famous political family, and its most talked-about pages are about the two times the prime minister’s job came to her door.

What does Sonia Gandhi say about Rajiv becoming PM?

She was against it. In an excerpt published by The Guardian and reported by Gulf News, she recalls pleading with her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, not to accept the post after his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in October 1984. She describes the moment he agreed as feeling like a knife in her heart. Her fear was for his life: seven years later, in 1991, Rajiv was killed in a suicide bombing while campaigning in Tamil Nadu.

The Indian Express carried a line from the book in which she describes being torn: one part of her rejected the idea of becoming prime minister outright, while another spoke of duty, and she longed for Rajiv’s presence.

The 2004 decision

That refers to May 2004, when the Congress-led alliance won the general election and Sonia Gandhi, as party president, was expected to become prime minister. She stepped aside and Manmohan Singh took the job, which he held for ten years. Her opponents had made her Italian birth a campaign issue, and the book revisits that “foreign origin” controversy, according to several Indian outlets.

Why she wrote it

In a video ahead of the launch, she said the book is meant to correct accounts of her life she called “invented or exaggerated”, and joked that it might cause some “tamasha”, ThePrint reported. The memoir was earlier caught up in a dispute with Penguin Random House India before moving to HarperCollins.

Why Pakistanis are reading about it

The Gandhi family’s story runs through some of the biggest moments in India-Pakistan history, from Indira Gandhi’s 1971 war to Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 meeting with Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad, the first visit by an Indian prime minister in decades. Sonia, now 79, has rarely spoken at length about her private life, which makes this her fullest account yet.

These are her memories, in her own words; the book is the only source for many of them.