Sonia Gandhi's memoir revisits 2004 prime ministership and accuses BJP of dismantling democracy

A memoir published on 10 November

Sonia Gandhi's memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', went on sale on Tuesday, 10 November, published by HarperCollins India. The 79-year-old former Congress president traces her path from a small village near Vicenza in Italy to the centre of India's Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. She married Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi in 1968, when his mother Indira Gandhi was serving as prime minister. The book returns to the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and sets out her view of the decades that followed.

The 2004 prime ministership

The New York Times reports that in May 2004, party elders pressed her to become prime minister after Congress won the national election. She initially said yes, but then recanted, a reversal that horrified her two children, Rahul and Priyanka. In an excerpt published in The Indian Express, she writes that her children discussed the prime ministership with her. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who sat beside her mother during the interview, recalled the fear they felt at the time.

“My brother and I actually thought that she would get killed, too.”

Modi, the hospital visits and the UPA years

Gandhi, who led Congress for a total of 19 years, writes that she has had 'practically no real contact' with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his more than 12 years in office. Their encounters are mostly formal gatherings in the Lok Sabha Speaker's chamber, and she describes how he tends to look away when they meet.

“It's a very small room, and usually many people are present, but when he comes face-to-face with me, we greet each other with a formal namaste.”

Gandhi adds that Modi has occasionally asked whether she is all right after her hospital visits this year. Those visits included admissions in January and March for respiratory discomfort and a systemic infection, followed by a routine check-up in May. For years, the BJP and other opposition leaders claimed that the UPA government under Manmohan Singh was run from 10 Janpath, her residence. The memoir says she was never shown government files during that period and calls the allegations that she requested files from the PMO false.

The Emergency row and a chronology

The BJP accused her of trying to justify the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, a 21-month period in which civil liberties were effectively suspended. The party said the book should be retitled as a whitewash. Gandhi responded by accusing the BJP of systematically dismantling India's democratic institutions, in remarks reported by ANI. The central dates of her story, as the articles describe them, run in the sequence shown below.