NEW DELHI: Two days before the India release of her memoir, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi on Sunday described it as “not a political book but a personal one,” emphasising that she wanted to portray her family honestly, as people she knew and loved.“This is not a political book, it’s a personal one. Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were, their motivations, their struggles, their very human flaws. I wanted to portray them honestly, as people I knew and loved,” the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson wrote on X.She gave a detailed account of how the book, titled “Belonging: A Journey of Love,” came to be in an article for The Hindu, which had published a detailed interview with her on Saturday.“For most of my life, I kept my inner world to myself. Even after grief pulled me into politics, I held on to whatever privacy I could, and writing openly about my life felt almost unthinkable. Only after stepping back from the daily churn of public life could I see my own story clearly,” Sonia Gandhi wrote in the article.“When I did look back, one thread ran through all of it: love, and the loyalty that grows from it. It all began in England, where a 19-year-old woman from a small Italian town met a young Indian student. It carried me into a new country and a new family, into a deep bond with my mother-in-law (Indira Gandhi), and through the years of raising our children,” she added, referring to her future husband, Rajiv Gandhi, who went on to become India’s youngest Prime Minister.
“It also carried me through the unbearable, when I lost first my mother-in-law and then my husband to violence,” the former Congress president wrote.Published by HarperCollins India, Gandhi’s memoir will be released in India on November 10, ending uncertainty over the book’s domestic publication following an “impasse” between the author’s representatives and Penguin Random House India.The book covers major tragedies that impacted the Gandhi family, including the death of Sonia Gandhi’s brother-in-law Sanjay Gandhi in a plane crash, Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991.The memoir also delves into political events surrounding the Congress-led alliance’s victory in the 2004 elections, when Sonia Gandhi declined to become Prime Minister and instead led the party and its alliance, which governed India till 2014.