New Delhi (India) (AFP) – The destiny of Sonia Gandhi is an incredible odyssey, which took her from a small Italian village to the heart of power in India, where she became the tutelary figure of the most influential political family in the country since its independence.
Published on: 10/11/2026 - 12:28
At 79, this discreet woman publishes her memoirs, in which she looks back on her destiny marked, in her words, by "love, duty, mourning and the quest for a place to find her place".
The book, titled "Belonging: A Journey of Love," comes out in English on Nov. 10, as the Congress party she led for more than two decades seeks to regain its political influence.
For weeks, his son Rahul, leader of the parliamentary opposition to Hindu ultranationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been one of the figures in the revolt launched against the revision deemed partisan of the electoral lists.
Born in 1946 into an Italian Catholic family, Sonia Gandhi has often been the target of criticism in India because of her foreign origins.
After a peaceful childhood in a village near Vicenza, in the north of the peninsula, she left to study English in the United Kingdom where in 1965 she met a student named Rajiv Gandhi.
“My love story began in a small Greek restaurant in Cambridge,” she described on social media. “From our first meeting, I felt that he was someone with whom I would want to share my life.”
“Like a tigress”
A life necessarily out of the ordinary, since Rajiv is none other than the son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, hero of independence and first leader of India.
Three years later, Sonia Gandhi moved in with her husband, at the Prime Minister's residence. In the shadow of her iron-tempered mother-in-law, she discovers India and power. “Everything I am and that I know, I learned” from Gandhi, she told the daily The Hindu.
In 1984, she was one of the first to rush to Indira Gandhi, who was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards in the gardens of the residence.
She then confides that she "fights like a tiger" to dissuade her husband, a pilot, from entering politics to take up the torch. “When my husband was asked to become Prime Minister, I was totally against it.”
But the death four years earlier in a plane crash of her younger brother Sanjay, then considered the political heir of Indira Gandhi, left her husband little other choice.
Having become Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi was in turn killed in a suicide attack in 1991. For six years, the young widow led a reclusive existence, raising her two children Rahul and Priyanka far from the spotlight.
In 1998, it was his turn to give in to the calls of Congress leaders and take the helm.
“Work hard”
At 51, Sonia Gandhi threw herself into the Indian political arena because, she said, “her heart is buried in the earth of this country”. Despite the criticisms which do not spare the “foreigner”, even within her own camp.
Although she gave up the post of Prime Minister in 2004 in favor of Manmohan Singh - at the request of her two children, she assures - she remained very influential within a party in decline, with a reputation tarnished by corruption.
In 2014, Narendra Modi's Hindu ultranationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unsurprisingly ousted the Congress from power and established its rule over the country.
The new heir of the Gandhi family, Rahul, has since struggled to restore the party's image.
The revolt of the youth born in the spring with the advent of the "cockroaches" movement and the mobilization to demand the resignation of the head of the electoral commission perhaps mark the beginning of a rebound, hopes Sonia Gandhi.
“Over the past twelve years, a lot of damage has been done to our country, its democracy and its institutions,” she lamented in The Hindu. “The Congress and the opposition were not able to fight on equal terms against the government (...) but our party resisted and is progressing.”
bur-juf/pa/ms
© 2026 AFP
The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.
