Sonia Gandhi interview: ‘Great damage done to the fabric of India by BJP’

In this wide-ranging interview to The Hindu on her soon-to-be-launched book, Belonging: A Journey of Love, published by HarperCollins India, Sonia Gandhi responds in writing to a number of questions, personal, historical, and political, raised by N.

Ram. The subjects covered include how she came to write her story about belonging; the values she grew up with and came to learn and cherish in India; what she learnt from Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi and how they shaped her life and outlook; the “great damage … done to the fabric of our country, our democracy and our institutions” by the BJP-RSS dispensation; how she viewed, and now looks back on, the Emergency of 1975-1977; the major political decisions she made to accept the office of Congress President in 1998 and to continue in it, after a challenge by some colleagues, in 1999, and in 2004 to decline the offer to become Prime Minister; the current political situation and the prospects of the Congress and its coalition partners; and the change of publisher in India just weeks before the book’s launch.

‘Others have spent decades telling my “story”,’ you posted on X the other day, ‘now it’s my turn.’ My AI-assisted bibliographical search suggests there are at least 75 books, including several biographies, that attempt or purport to tell your story in substantial measure.

Your post hints that you were amused rather than irritated or angry about others presuming to tell your story. Am I right? And did you read those books, or at least some of them, written by biographers and others who spent decades telling your ‘story’?

I had no idea there were so many! But I have never felt like reading books about myself. A long time ago Rajiv and I realised that there was no point in trying to keep up with all that had been written about us. But, as I say in the book, there came a time when I felt that I should tell my own story.

In the Prologue to Belonging, you give us an insight into how you came to write your story, ‘perhaps…a story worth sharing,’ as you put it somewhat self-deprecatingly. Was it the ‘chorus’, which was on your case for years, or something within you, or both that eventually pushed you over the line to give us this intimate and unusually candid story?

And may I ask how long it took you to write the book, breaks and all? It’s been such a long time that I’ve lost track, but it has certainly been more than a decade since I first wrote a bit. I only started writing in earnest about five years ago.

It wasn’t an uninterrupted process. There were times when words and thoughts flowed, others when nothing would come out, and I would throw my hands up in frustration. You describe Belonging as a personal memoir, with politics providing the background or ‘a kind of framework’.

But it’s really a love story at its heart and that’s how I read it. The story of an extraordinary, instantly formed magnetic bond of love between Rajiv and Sonia, which gradually grew into something much larger, drawing you into the highest circles of power, then reluctantly into public life and politics, and eventually making you one of the country’s foremost political leaders.

Stranger than fiction, isn’t it? Yes! That’s one reason I had no desire to talk about it for so long. But it is not only a love story between the two of us, it’s also the story of how I grew to love Rajiv’s family and the country to which they belonged, and then I too came to belong in it.

And of how this love brought me into public life, when I saw the purpose of all the sacrifices they had made being threatened, and the party was weakening. I felt I had to do something. The writer R.K. Narayan once observed that, despite the passage of time and physical ageing, ‘the chap inside is the same,’ capturing the enduring sense of self.

You grew up in a small town in Italy, in a family and social environment far removed from the world that you would eventually inhabit and make your own. Looking back over more than six decades in India, how much of that young Italian woman survives in the person you are today?

The values that I learnt growing up survive. I have tried my best to be true to them: loyalty to family and friends, sincerity and feeling for others, the idea of being dutiful and responsible. I think I can say that in these I am the same person Rajiv met sixty years ago.

But I used to smile and laugh a lot more then! Also read | How a love story grew into a deep belonging to India Rajiv Gandhi, the love of your life, and Indira Gandhi, with whom you shared an exceptionally close bond, are central figures in your story.

Looking back, what do you see as their defining qualities and the ways in which each shaped your life and outlook? When I arrived in India as a young bride, I knew nothing about India. All that I am and know today, I learnt from them.

Their courage, their empathy, their commitment to a secular and democratic India and most of all, the pull of duty that was greater than any other for both of them was something that inspired me and held me steadfast during times of difficulty and doubt.

You write that Sanjay Gandhi’s name had become synonymous with the Emergency, and that Rajiv used to report complaints or feedback he had heard to his mother, but there was never any response from her. Do you think the so-called excesses of the Emergency could have been avoided had Indira Gandhi listened to her elder son and to others who were honest with her about what they had heard or experienced or observed?

It was not only Sanjay, though in the public mind he is often seen as synonymous with the Emergency. There was a lot of pressure from some of her senior colleagues, and I think there were very few people around her like Rajiv who had a different point of view.

I think eventually my mother-in-law began to understand the situation through her own wisdom and took actions to remedy it. The Emergency I lived through and opposed was, indisputably, a dark chapter in the history of independent...