The importance of being Sonia Gandhi

Résumé détaillé

Rajdeep Sardesai reviews Sonia Gandhi's memoir 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', tracing her journey from Italy to Indian politics, her personal losses and political legacy, while questioning why Penguin chose not to publish the book.

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 is the difficult task of convincing her parents, especially her rather stern father, about her choice, the first meeting with her formidable mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, and the adjustment to life in Delhi as a young bride in a government bungalow, with its peculiar mix of privilege, protocol and prying eyes.

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…

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