Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi is set to tell her story in her own words with a memoir that traces six decades of love, loss, family and politics, including her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, the assassinations that transformed her life and her eventual emergence as one of India’s most consequential political figures.
Titled Belonging: A Journey of Love, the memoir is scheduled to be published internationally on November 10 by Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House India has not yet confirmed when the book will be released in India.
The 79-year-old Congress leader, who has largely guarded her private life despite decades in public view, is expected to offer a personal account of experiences that unfolded alongside some of the defining political events in modern India.
A romance in Cambridge
The memoir begins far from Indian politics. In 1965, 19-year-old Sonia Maino was studying in Cambridge, England, when she met Rajiv Gandhi. According to the publisher, the encounter began a romance that would eventually bring her from her childhood in post-war Italy into the Nehru-Gandhi family.
The book follows her adjustment to a dramatically different country and culture. Gandhi recalls learning Hindi, adopting the sari and developing a taste for Indian food, while also describing her relationship with her mother-in-law, then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Her early married life was relatively removed from politics. Rajiv worked as a commercial airline pilot, while the couple raised their children, Rahul and Priyanka.
That life was progressively transformed by a series of family tragedies.
Loss reshaped her life
Sanjay Gandhi's death in a plane crash in 1980 altered the family's trajectory and increased pressure on Rajiv to enter politics. Four years later, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards, propelling Rajiv into the prime minister's office.
The memoir recounts Sonia Gandhi's apprehensions about her husband's political career and the personal cost of his increasingly prominent public role.
The greatest tragedy came in May 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber during an election campaign in Tamil Nadu.
The killing left Sonia Gandhi widowed with two children and fundamentally changed the direction of her life. She resisted repeated appeals to enter active politics for several years, preferring to remain outside the political arena.
Gandhi says it was ultimately grief and loss that pushed her into the public world she had previously tried to avoid.
Reluctant entry into politics
After years of resistance, Gandhi formally assumed a major political role in 1998 when she became president of the Congress at a time when the party was struggling organisationally and electorally.
She would go on to become the party's longest-serving president, remaining at its helm for much of the period between 1998 and 2022.
The memoir is expected to provide her perspective on this transition — from someone fiercely protective of her privacy to the head of India's principal Opposition party and, eventually, the central figure behind the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.
Her years in politics coincided with major changes in India's economy, society and political landscape, developments that the book promises to examine from an insider's perspective.
Why she declined PM post
Among the most anticipated sections will be Gandhi's account of the events following the 2004 Lok Sabha election.
The Congress emerged as the largest party in the UPA coalition and Gandhi was widely expected to become prime minister. Instead, she declined the position and backed former finance minister Manmohan Singh for the country's top executive office.
The decision became one of the defining moments of her political career and has remained the subject of considerable political debate and speculation.
Belonging will provide Gandhi's own account of why she chose not to become prime minister despite having led the Congress campaign and possessing the support required to head the coalition government.
She subsequently remained UPA chairperson through the alliance's decade in power between 2004 and 2014.
‘Homage to their humanness’
Gandhi has said that although an enormous amount has been written about her family, many accounts failed to fully capture the motivations, actions and human shortcomings of the people involved.
She describes the memoir as, in part, a homage to that human dimension.
Writing it, however, was not easy. Gandhi said recounting her life required opening up experiences and emotions she had kept private for decades.
The book consequently promises to be more than a conventional political memoir. Its narrative stretches from small-town Italy to Cambridge, New Delhi and the centre of Indian political power, with personal relationships forming the thread connecting these dramatically different worlds.
For Gandhi, the story is ultimately one of belonging — how a young Italian woman who arrived in India through marriage came to regard the country as home, endured extraordinary personal loss and eventually spent decades at the heart of its politics.
The memoir will also offer her perspective on the economic, social and political transformation she has witnessed during nearly six decades in India, while providing a rare glimpse into a private life that has remained largely inaccessible despite intense public scrutiny.