Sonia Gandhi's memoir promises answers on India's most powerful dynasty

When Sonia Gandhi took over India's Congress party in 1998, she arrived as a puzzle. Italian-born, widowed, and largely unknown to Indian politics, she had spent years keeping her distance from public life. Yet within months of becoming party president, she had begun reshaping one of the world's oldest political organizations. A magazine profile from that era captured the paradox: she was described as inscrutable and shielded by security, speaking in an accent that marked her as foreign, yet already demonstrating an uncanny ability to listen to competing voices, gather information, and make decisions that stuck. "Nobody is left out of the decision-making process and no voice is gagged," the profile noted. "But it is her word that prevails."

Now, at 79, Gandhi is telling her own story. Her memoir, titled Belonging: A Journey of Love, arrives in November from major publishers in the United States and Britain. It opens in Cambridge in 1965, where a 19-year-old Italian student named Sonia Maino fell in love with Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of India's first prime minister. That marriage would bind her to one of the world's most scrutinized political dynasties—and expose her to losses that few people endure.

The book's arrival has already sparked controversy. Reports emerged that Penguin Random House India had requested changes to the manuscript, with Congress leaders alleging political pressure to soften passages critical of the government. Penguin denied the claim, saying it remained willing to publish while discussions continued. But the dispute signals how much Indians expect this memoir to reveal. Readers will be searching for answers to questions that have shadowed Indian politics for decades: Why did she enter politics at all? And most pressingly, why did she decline the prime ministership in 2004?

That decision remains the central mystery. After Congress won elections that year, Sonia had the backing of her party, her allies, and the president's office, which had prepared a letter inviting her to form the government. Yet she stepped aside and chose Manmohan Singh, the architect of India's economic liberalization, instead. Was she concerned that her foreign origins would fatally undermine her authority? In his own memoirs, former Congress leader Natwar Singh claimed that her son Rahul Gandhi had vehemently opposed his mother becoming prime minister, fearing she would meet the fate of his grandmother Indira and his father Rajiv—both assassinated. Rahul, Singh wrote, said he was prepared to take "any possible step" to prevent it. Whether Sonia's memoir will confirm, contradict, or reframe that account remains unknown.

Her decision to decline power transformed Indian politics. The Congress-led government that followed, with Singh as prime minister and Sonia as the party's guiding force, won two successive elections and passed landmark legislation including the right to information law and a rural employment guarantee program. Yet the second term collapsed under corruption scandals, policy paralysis, and a sense that the party had become captive to its own leadership. Critics called Sonia the government's "remote control," questioning how much power she wielded over Singh. Her defenders saw her as the political glue holding together a fractious coalition.

But the larger question concerns what drew her into politics in the first place. After Rajiv's assassination in 1991 by a suicide bomber, she had withdrawn almost entirely from public life. She had, in fact, fought fiercely against Rajiv's own entry into politics years earlier, writing in a 1994 book that she had "fought like a tiger" to keep him out. Yet as Congress declined through the 1990s, she joined the party in 1997 and became its president within a year. When she arrived, rivals dismissed her as little more than a housewife or an "Italian wonder." One Congress veteran later admitted: "I never thought that the lady could spring such a surprise."

The memoir will also confront uncomfortable questions. Will she discuss the Bofors scandal, which damaged Rajiv's government and generated decades of controversy around the family's alleged links to Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi? Will she address the relentless criticism of her foreign origins—the derision that sometimes branded her "the Italian au pair," or the 2004 declaration by BJP leader Sushma Swaraj that a foreign-born prime minister would be "an insult to the nation"? And perhaps most significantly, will she explain why she passed Congress leadership to her son Rahul in 2017 rather than to his sister Priyanka, who many observers saw as more naturally charismatic and politically gifted? Priyanka did not formally enter electoral politics until 2019, after years of speculation about her role.

The book's title itself may offer a clue to what Sonia wants to convey. Belonging suggests not a political reckoning but a defence of inheritance—an attempt to explain what the Nehru-Gandhi legacy has meant to her and why she believes it still matters. In a statement about the memoir, she said she wanted it "to be a testament of my heart's journey through the tender joys and dark despair that have marked my life." She also noted that "much has been written about my family, but few narratives were able to reach into the truth of their motivations, their actions and even their very human failings." As Congress faces sustained attack from the ruling BJP, which has campaigned for a "Congress-free India," and as the party struggles with electoral defeats and defections, that question of belonging—and whether the Gandhi family can hold the party together—has become urgent.