By Rajdeep Sardesai
No politician in contemporary Indian politics has been as consistently vilified as Sonia Gandhi. Ever since she stepped out of the shadows and entered public life in 1998, she has been a target of relentless criticism, much of it centred not on her politics but on her origins.
She has been repeatedly reminded that she was born Italian, as if the accident of birth should forever disqualify her from claiming an Indian identity. Which is why her memoir, appropriately titled Belonging: A Journey of Love, is a significant moment.
Not many Indian politicians are comfortable telling their own life stories, particularly when those stories involve the complicated intersection of family, power and politics. That Sonia Gandhi has chosen to open up after decades of guarding her privacy suggests a desire to finally lift the veil of silence and tell her side of the story.
It is, frankly, an extraordinary story. That a young girl from a small Italian town would eventually become the longest-serving president of the Indian National Congress and, for a decade, arguably the most influential political figure in the country is the sort of unscripted journey that defies imagination. Some of the stories in the book have been heard before.
Her meeting with Rajiv Gandhi at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge has all the ingredients of a Hindi cinema romance: love at first sight, a young Indian student and a nineteen-year-old Italian girl who could hardly have imagined where that encounter would take her.
Yet the story deserves retelling. There are also deeply personal revelations that are less familiar. I, for one, did not know that Sonia Gandhi lost her first child shortly after birth in 1968-69. She describes how she fought to ensure that the little body was buried rather than disposed of in a manner that was customary at the time.
It is a heartbreaking episode, but also a revealing one: a young woman negotiating grief and unfamiliar customs in a country that was still very new to her. Perhaps the most poignant passages come after the assassinations that transformed her life. Indira Gandhi was killed in 1984; Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated seven years later.
Her sister urged her to return to Italy after Rajiv’s death, warning that she too could be next. It was hardly an unreasonable fear. Sonia reveals that she has never even summoned the courage to look at photographs of Rajiv’s mutilated body.
And yet she chose to stay. Her emotional ties, she suggests, were no longer simply with the country of her birth but with the land that had become home to her and to her children. This is perhaps the central thread running through the memoir: belonging is not necessarily inherited; it can be acquired through love, loss, loyalty and the choices one makes.
Her eventual entry into politics was, by her own account, hardly an act of ambition. She admits to having little affection for politicians, whom she regarded as venal and duplicitous. Her children too were opposed to her taking the plunge.
Yet she describes her decision as one driven by a sense of duty, even recounting how she read and understood the Bhagavad Gita before entering public life. Of course, critics will read the memoir differently.
They will argue that it reinforces the charge that Sonia helped institutionalise dynastic politics, ensuring that the Nehru-Gandhi family remained inseparable from the party. Her supporters will counter that she entered public life reluctantly, motivated less by personal ambition than by an abiding sense of obligation to her family and the party.
Both interpretations deserve scrutiny. But there is another dimension to Sonia’s story that cannot be ignored. Despite her years at the top of the Congress, she was never entirely accepted by sections of the political establishment. Her foreign origins became a political weapon, her leadership was mocked, and the attacks frequently extended to her children.
I have often felt that Sonia Gandhi’s greatest political strength is her understanding of her own limitations. She is a good listener, rarely sought to dominate every conversation and has understood the importance of allowing others space. That she helped construct a coalition of disparate political parties which governed India for ten years after 2004 suggests that she could combine political pragmatism with a commitment to certain principles.
She has remained resolutely opposed to communal politics — she maintains that the BJP-RSS idea of India is antithetical to the Gandhi-Nehru vision of an inclusive society— and has backed a more compassionate model of rights-based governance. Her decision to decline the prime ministership in 2004 remains one of the most consequential moments of her political career, whatever interpretation one places on it.
She says her mind was made up months earlier and was not based on a sudden discovery of her ‘inner voice’, but clearly there was also a realisation that becoming prime minister would revive the foreign origin debate in an even more viscerally emotive manner. None of this means that her political record is beyond criticism.
In the book she is very cautious in addressing the charge-sheet against her: for those looking for headline-grabbing controversies, the book may appear trapped in political correctness. The Bofors scandal that eventually felled the Rajiv government is glossed over, as are her differences with Narasimha Rao, nor is she willing to tell the reader what went wrong between the Gandhis and the Bachchans. Why does Sonia Gandhi still matter?
Not merely because she once occupied the commanding heights of Indian politics, or because she remains a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. She matters because her life raises questions about identity, acceptance and political inheritance that remain relevant to India today.
Whether history ultimately judges her kindly is for another day. But after decades of being spoken about, Sonia Gandhi has finally chosen to speak for herself. And that, in itself, makes Belonging worth reading. P.S. I am still intrigued by why Penguin decided not to publish the book, which is almost certain to be a best seller.
Having read the memoir, I struggle to see anything in it that should have prompted self-censorship, or fear of those in power.
If anything, it raises a larger question: have we reached a point where even a publisher’s willingness to publish a political memoir of an op position leader is cause for being fearful of the consequences? And what does that say for free speech in India 2026?
The writer is a senior journalist and author.
