Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has broken decades of silence about her private life in a new memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', which went on sale across India on Tuesday, 10 November. The book, published by HarperCollins India, runs to more than 500 pages and traces her journey from a childhood in post-war Italy through her marriage into the Nehru-Gandhi family, the assassinations of her mother-in-law and her husband, and her reluctant rise to the leadership of the Congress party.
The most personal revelation concerns her health. Gandhi writes that during the second term of the Congress-led UPA government she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery in Milan, Italy, in 2010, performed by the renowned surgeon Dr Umberto Veronesi. A year later, a routine follow-up test detected a growth in her pancreas, which was found to be at a precancerous stage and was treated at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, by pancreatic surgeon Dr Casper van Eijck.
She says she chose to have the treatment abroad, and to keep it secret, to protect her privacy and avoid the intense media attention a major medical procedure in India would have attracted. Only Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a few senior colleagues knew she had left for surgery. She also writes of another medical emergency in August 2016, when she collapsed during an election roadshow in Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh. She had never spoken publicly about any of these episodes before.
The memoir also revisits the most consequential decision of her political life: her refusal to become prime minister after the Congress party's surprise victory in the 2004 general election. Gandhi writes that she had discussed the possibility with her children, Rahul and Priyanka, before the election, and that both opposed it, fearing for her safety after the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. She had assured them she would not accept the post.
When the moment arrived, her resolve faltered under pressure from party leaders who urged her to reconsider, and she spent a difficult night torn between her sense of duty to the Congress and the promise she had made to her children. The next morning, she told Rahul she would stick to her decision, and instead chose Manmohan Singh to lead the government. She also rejects the long-standing suggestion that she subsequently ran the government by proxy, calling allegations that she summoned government files from the Prime Minister's Office "malicious and totally false".
Gandhi also offers a rare personal assessment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with whom she says she has had "practically no real contact" despite his having served as prime minister for more than 12 years. She writes that he avoids eye contact with her, and she questions his political ideology, while finding an unexpected point of understanding in their shared discomfort with Delhi's privileged political establishment.
The book covers much more besides: the loss of her first child after a premature delivery, her first meeting with Rajiv Gandhi in Cambridge in 1965 and their marriage in 1968, her recollections of the Emergency and Operation Blue Star, her relationships with senior Congress leaders including Pranab Mukherjee — who, she writes, never realised his ambition to become prime minister — and the deterioration of her relationship with Maneka Gandhi.
The memoir itself made headlines before its release. Penguin Random House India clarified that it would not publish the book in India, and HarperCollins India subsequently announced that it would bring it out on 10 November. Excerpts published in the Indian Express on Tuesday, in which Gandhi discussed her refusal of the prime ministership, set off a day of coverage and debate across Indian media.
For a politician who has spent most of her public life avoiding the media, the book is a remarkable document — part personal history, part political record, and part answer to the questions that have followed her for more than two decades. Whether it changes how India sees her will become clear in the days ahead, but the revelations about her health and the 2004 decision have already made it one of the most talked-about books of the year.
