Aug 20, 2026 12:32 pm IST

Opinion | Manmohan Singh To Bachchans, The Many Mysteries Sonia Gandhi's Memoir Could Solve

She entered politics reluctantly, mastered its power games, chose Prime Ministers, and managed betrayals. Congress's most powerful woman finally tells the world how.

Rasheed Kidwai Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

Political memoirs are often written twice: first by memory, then by self-preservation. The best ones resist the temptation of the second.

In this context, Sonia Gandhi's forthcoming memoir, titled Belonging: A Journey of Love and to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 10, comes with an unusual burden of expectation. At 544 pages, the memoir promises to travel from her childhood in post-war Italy and her meeting with Rajiv Gandhi in Cambridge to life inside India's first political family, the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, her reluctant entry into politics, and her years at the helm of the Congress. Sonia herself says she wants to reach the motivations, actions, and "very human failings" of a family about which much has been written.

Few Indian politicians have wielded so much influence while revealing so little of themselves. Sonia has been the Congress president, Leader of the Opposition, UPA chairperson, National Advisory Council chairperson, and, for ten years, the political pole around which a coalition government revolved. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how she understood her own power.

In the mouths and pens of others, Sonia Gandhi's story is usually compressed into one convenient word: dynasty. But dynasty alone does not explain it. She did not grow up inside the Congress, inherit its political vocabulary, or possess unquestioned legitimacy within it. She entered that world through Rajiv Gandhi and, after losing him, had to negotiate it herself. Over the years, she had to fight, win, cajole, reconcile, absorb rebellion, and repeatedly act as matriarch to a party whose veterans were often older, more experienced, and more rooted in politics than she was.

Belonging has an opportunity to tell us how she did it.

Before Politics Came Family

The early chapters may prove among the most revealing precisely because Sonia Gandhi was not born into politics. Politics came looking for her.

The geographical arc itself is remarkable: from Orbassano, the comune near Turin where she grew up, to Cambridge; from marriage into the Nehru-Gandhi household to 1 Safdarjung Road, 10 Janpath, and eventually the very centre of Indian power. But the more interesting journey is psychological. At what point did a woman who fiercely guarded her private life begin to regard stewardship of the Congress almost as a familial obligation?

She arrived in India as Sonia Maino, married Rajiv in 1968, and entered a household where the private and the political were almost impossible to separate.........

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