Image source, Reuters
The morning of 31 October 1984.
At that time Sonia Gandhi was living in the Prime Minister's residence in Delhi. She was about to take a bath when she heard gunshots in the garden.
His mother-in-law and Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi had just left for her office located in a nearby building. A few moments later he was murdered by his two Sikh bodyguards.
This murder took place in response to the action taken by the Indian Army at the Golden Temple in Amritsar earlier the same year. The Golden Temple is the most sacred pilgrimage site of Sikhism.
To Sonia Gandhi, the sound of gunshots sounded like firecrackers, but it was "different".
The children's nanny came nervously to the bathroom door and started pointing towards the garden.
Sonia ran towards that path. A white Ambassador car was slowly coming towards them.
Indira Gandhi was lying soaked in blood inside the car. Her saree was stained with blood. His eyes were open and Sonia saw a look of surprise on his face.
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Sonia said, "Mummy, mummy." But no other words could come out of his mouth.
She kept waiting for hours in the hospital. At last the doctor's response by nodding his head made him understand what he was afraid of.
But his suffering did not end here.
Indira Gandhi's elder son and Sonia's husband Rajiv Gandhi was called from a rally in West Bengal.
After reaching there, Rajiv told Sonia that the party leaders wanted him to become the Prime Minister.
Image source: Getty Images
Sonia's reaction was full of anger and fear.
He pleaded with Rajiv, "They will kill you. They will kill you too."
Rajiv replied, "They will kill me anyway."
The same evening, when Indira Gandhi's mortal remains were kept at home, Rajiv Gandhi took oath as Prime Minister.
This is one of the most poignant and shocking episodes of Sonia Gandhi's new autobiography 'Belonging: A Journey of Love'.
In this, the deep tragedy of private life and the enormous pressures of public life come together.
The woman who had stayed away from politics for a long time was now the wife of the Prime Minister of India.
Later, she became the President of the Congress Party, led the party to victory in two general elections and became one of the most influential political figures of the country.
This incident also points to another devastating personal tragedy to come.
Rajiv Gandhi was also assassinated in 1991.
Challenging times started after the death of Rajiv Gandhi
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For Sonia Gandhi, the subsequent years were a period of staying away from public life and withdrawing into herself.
At the age of 19, a girl living in a small town in Italy met Rajiv Gandhi, an Indian student in England. This relationship connected him to a new country and a new family. He also had a close relationship with Indira Gandhi. India had become her home through her husband and mother-in-law.
After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, it became very difficult for Sonia to participate in public programs. It was her responsibility to attend the programs of the memorial trusts of which she was the president. But every time it was a difficult experience for him. Before giving the speech, he was afraid that he might lose control of his tears.
When the Dalai Lama asked her whether she wanted to take revenge on her husband's killers, she replied, "No, not so."
As soon as she said this, she started crying bitterly.
She writes that gradually Rajiv became for her "a feeling present within me rather than a deep absence".
But his sadness would return on important family occasions.
When politics started attracting him
When her son Rahul graduated from Cambridge University in 1995, Sonia and her children became emotional thinking about how proud Rajiv would have felt that day.
Meanwhile, politics was gradually pulling him towards itself. The Congress Party, which had been a political identity of her husband's family for several generations, was losing its organizational base and electoral ground. Many senior leaders of the party were leaving it and the demand for Sonia Gandhi to take over the leadership was increasing.
Initially he denied it. She writes that while living with Rajiv, she had seen politics closely. There were achievements, but also "ambition and greed, hypocrisy and betrayal".
She writes, "I had always disliked politics." Politics had taken away from him first his mother-in-law and then “the love of my life, the father of my children”.
But the decline of Congress was now beginning to affect him personally. Passing by photographs of Indira and Rajiv, she would be filled with "a mixed feeling of pain and guilt".
He feared that the forces against which Indira and Rajiv had fought to "protect India's pluralistic culture" were becoming stronger. According to him, rising Hindu nationalism was a threat to the "secular and pluralist idea" of India that his family had tried to protect.
Congress leaders argued that if Sonia Gandhi did not take charge of the party, the party might disintegrate and there would be very little strength left to counter communal politics.
Sonia believed that the appeal of her family name was beyond the boundaries of religion, caste, language and region. She writes that this was the "most effective argument" given in favor of joining the party.
When I started doubting my abilities
Image source: Sondeep Shankar/Getty Images
He also had doubts about his abilities and capabilities. She wondered how, as an outsider, she could replace the two big leaders who had led her family politically.
At home, Rahul and Priyanka were afraid that they might lose their mother too, like they had lost their grandmother and father. Before leaving for the New Year holidays, both of them took a promise from their mother, "Don't take any step in our absence that could create problems."
Sonia Gandhi writes that she found the "answer" to this in the Bhagavad Gita.
Although she was not religious as an adult, in January 1997 she arranged to read the Gita privately with a Sanskrit scholar. Both of them studied this book verse by verse.
She writes that the main message of Geeta finally removed the conflict in her mind. The message was that one should perform one's dharma i.e. duty and not worry about its consequences.
She writes, "I had found answers to my doubts and questions. I had to come forward and go where my duty called me. And I did so."
Image source: AFP via Getty Images
However, the most dramatic political episode of the memoir comes seven years later, after the Congress's electoral victory in 2004. Sonia had led the party's election campaign.
Sonia Gandhi reaches Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi with Manmohan Singh and formally stakes claim to form the Congress-led coalition government before the President. Everyone is assuming that she will become the Prime Minister. But she doesn't say anything.
After returning home, she tells a senior party colleague that she has decided not to accept the post of Prime Minister. Party workers gather outside his house. Senior leaders of the party demand to meet him.
A leader says, "You contested the elections, you led us. People trusted you. How can you disappoint them like this? Our workers will revolt. Do you think they will accept another leader?"
Image source: Pascal Le Segretain/Sygma via Getty Images
The leaders of the alliance arrive to convince him. Sonia writes that they surrounded her from all sides and one of them insisted, "We will not accept your refusal." Under pressure she says softly, "Okay." They take it as his consent and start congratulating him.
Sonia writes that her children are shocked to see this. Rahul comes to him angrily and asks, "You said yes?" His daughter Priyanka tells him not to take decisions under anyone's pressure.
Sonia writes that she keeps arguing about this with herself, friends and family members the whole night. This risk was not just his personal risk. He believed that the main opposition party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would continue to raise the issue of his foreign origin. He feared that by accepting the post of Prime Minister, this controversy could "create huge turmoil in the country" and could cause harm to the country.
By morning his decision was clear. She tells Rahul, "I have taken my decision. I will stick to my stand."
Image source, RAVI RAVEENDRAN/AFP via Getty Images
The most frank thing comes to light in the book when Sonia Gandhi goes beyond the memories of the family and discusses the India which she believes is now lost.
Sonia says that when she entered public life, "there used to be a kind of decency and decorum in parliamentary politics".
Political attacks and sharp statements were not new. But according to him, there is an increasing tendency among those in power to "demean and harass those whom they find disagree with them, and to intimidate those they consider their opponents."
He says this is part of a growing trend around the world in which "authoritarian rule also comes with brutality".
Sonia's assessment of Hindu nationalist BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unusually direct.
She writes that apart from formal greetings and occasional conversations at parliamentary functions, there has been "almost no real contact" between the two. Modi would sometimes ask him on his return from the hospital, "Are you okay?" Sonia says, "He often looks away and avoids making eye contact."
What did Sonia write about Modi?
The author writes that Modi's idea of India was shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This idea "promotes a fundamentalism in which one's religion and culture are above everything else". His India is an India of "hierarchy, order and control", while Sonia's India is "anti-domination", standing for "inclusivity, secularism and social justice".
Amidst this controversy, Sonia also accepts an important thing. She says she understands Modi's "discomfort with the ruling elite of our time".
Sonia says that she too felt uncomfortable in the drawing rooms of influential people of Delhi. Political conversation there seemed "far away from the reality of India".
She writes that Modi's background may not be as simple as his campaign team suggests. But he "certainly worked hard to rise from an underprivileged background to power within the RSS". This is a rare example of acknowledging the social distance between the top leadership of the Congress and the voting class that Modi later came to represent.
This memoir also contains glimpses of Sonia's meetings with many world leaders.
He remembers Vladimir Putin as an "interesting personality". He took them on a boat tour in St. Petersburg and told them about the monuments along the way. Sonia says she was impressed by his understanding of global politics and his "determination to return Russia to its former power status". She describes this meeting as "long before the Ukraine war, in a different era".
Sonia's silence on controversies
Another interesting meeting was related to Nicolas Sarkozy of France. He came to India in 2008, but his then partner Carla Bruni was not with him, because both of them were not married at that time.
During a state banquet, the wife of the Vice President of India started asking him questions with great enthusiasm. He asked when he was going to marry Carla Bruni, whether he missed her and whether the wedding date had been fixed.
Sarkozy answered all his questions. During this time he was also sending messages to Bruni on his phone.
A story about a family or political legacy is never completely fair. The Bofors gun deal scandal, which badly damaged the Rajiv Gandhi government and haunted the Gandhi family for decades, finds relatively little space in the book.
In this 502-page memoir, there is little mention of the less pleasant aspects of Congress's own record. Sonia has a lot to say about corruption, hypocrisy and falling standards of public life under the rule of her political opponents. But during the time Congress is in power, it mostly remains silent on the culture of protectionism, benefiting its close ones and corruption. It also does not examine Congress's own responsibility for the decline in public trust.
She tries her best to defend the political legacy inherited from her husband and mother-in-law, while the party she founded has been facing decline for a long time. Her story is not only about the cost of maintaining that legacy, but also about a woman who says she never wanted to live the life she ended up having to live.
This is what fills the last pages of this memoir with deep sadness. 79 year old Sonia is now a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament. 55-year-old Rahul is a four-time MP and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha. 53 year old Priyanka is also an MP.
The challenge, Sonia says, was to maintain a commitment to "a just and humane society" amid pain and separation, victory and defeat, and manipulation to suit political exigencies.
But she does not end her speech with a claim of victory. Nor does she express confidence that history will prove her right.
"At this point, I feel that I tried my best, but I could not succeed in pushing back the forces I had set out to fight."
We used AI to translate this article, which was originally written in English. A BBC journalist checked this translation before publication. Learn more about how we're using AI.
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