She led Congress during a period when Indian politics moved from coalition governments and economic liberalisation towards the much more dominant politics of Narendra Modi’s BJP and Hindu nationalism.
But perhaps the most revealing question is what Sonia’s memoir will choose to say – and what it will leave unsaid. Neerja Chowdhury suspects the answer may lie in the book’s title, Belonging.
“She has been conscious of being an inheritor of the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family – that legacy has to be kept alive,” Chowdhury says. She expects the memoir to return to family, its history, but above all to Sonia’s own sense of belonging to the dynasty and of assuming its political mantle as Congress president.
That legacy, of course, is now under sustained attack.
The ruling BJP has campaigned for a “Congress-mukt Bharat” (Congress-free India), while critics of the party increasingly frame its challenge as a fight against dynastic politics.
As the Congress has suffered repeated electoral setbacks and watched many of its leaders defect to rivals, the question has become not just whether the Gandhi family can revive the party, but whether it can hold it together.
It is a question that goes to the heart of what Sonia says she is trying to examine in her memoir.
“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. In many ways, this book is a homage to their humanness,” Sonia was quoted, external as saying on the book.
Her memoir may therefore be less a political reckoning than a defence of belonging – an attempt to explain what the Nehru-Gandhi inheritance has meant to her, and why she believes it still matters.
