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

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. The publisher's account makes clear that Sanjay Gandhi's death in the 1980 plane crash - and Rajiv's subsequent movement towards politics - will be central to the story. Sonia had herself written of resisting Rajiv's entry with extraordinary intensity, saying she had "fought like a tigress" for their family and their freedom.

But Belonging can take us further. What exactly were Sonia's relations with Sanjay? How did she view his enormous influence over Indira Gandhi? Did she merely fear politics for Rajiv, or did she have reservations about the political culture he was inheriting?

The Bachchan Saga

And then there are the Bachchans.

Amitabh Bachchan was not simply another celebrity friend of Rajiv Gandhi. The two families were once extremely close, and Amitabh entered electoral politics in 1984 as Rajiv's friend, winning Allahabad spectacularly. Yet, over time, the friendship disintegrated.

What happened? Was the rupture political, financial, personal - or an accumulation of all three? A memoir called Belonging cannot entirely avoid the story of people who once belonged almost to the family and then abruptly did not.

Nor can an account of Sonia's political evolution easily bypass 1998-99. Her arrival at the top of the Congress was hardly a coronation without resistance. What did she really make of Sitaram Kesri and the circumstances in which she replaced him? Then came a much more personal challenge. In 1999, Sharad Pawar, PA Sangma, and Tariq Anwar questioned her suitability for the highest office on grounds of her foreign origin - from within the Congress itself. Sonia resigned as party president; the organisation rallied behind her; the rebels were expelled and went on to establish the NCP. It was a defining test of authority. How did she experience it: as humiliation, betrayal, political challenge, or proof that she had finally acquired a constituency of her own?

Political memoirs by powerful women - from Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher to Benazir Bhutto and, more recently, Jacinda Ardern - become historically valuable when they reveal the human calculations beneath public decisions. Sonia's life contains more than enough for a compelling personal narrative. The question is whether she will stop at that fascinating human story - or open the political files as well.

Rao, Natwar, And Trust

The most intriguing political relationship to revisit may well be Sonia Gandhi's with PV Narasimha Rao.

Rao was no outsider to the Gandhi establishment. He had served Indira and Rajiv, and, after Rajiv's assassination, emerged as Congress President and Prime Minister. Yet Sonia and Rao went from a relationship of trust to an estrangement that became one of the defining internal conflicts of the Congress in the 1990s. Why?

One answer has long centred on Sonia's dissatisfaction with the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. Accounts from Congress figures say she felt the probe was moving too slowly and suspected that the full conspiracy had not been uncovered; she publicly expressed unhappiness in 1995. Her memoir should tell us what she actually believed.

The Rajiv assassination itself deserves a fuller reckoning. The LTTE's responsibility for the killing was established through investigation and trial, but Sonia's reported dissatisfaction went beyond the immediate perpetrators. What did she believe remained unresolved?

Then comes Natwar Singh, another relationship where affection hardened into hostility. Natwar was more than a foreign-policy adviser. A diplomat, writer, Nehru-Gandhi loyalist, and bibliophile, he belonged to Sonia's intellectual and political circle and often functioned as an informal literary counsellor as well. The rupture followed his exit from government amid the UN Oil-for-Food controversy, after which his memoir One Life Is Not Enough offered an unflattering account of Sonia and disputed her version of why she declined the Prime Ministership in 2004.=

What turned intimacy into permanent estrangement? Sonia has so far largely allowed Natwar's version to stand unanswered. Now she has her turn.

The Manmohan Mystery

When it comes to Sonia's powerplays, nothing will be scrutinised more closely than 2004, and why she chose Manmohan Singh.

Once Sonia decided not to become Prime Minister, the choice of the leader was hers. Pranab Mukherjee was senior, vastly more experienced politically and, by Manmohan's own admission, had reason to feel aggrieved. Arjun Singh, too, represented an older Congress order with considerable organisational weight.

Was Manmohan chosen because Sonia trusted him? Because he had no faction? Because his integrity and economic credentials reassured India and the world? Or because he was the rare leader who could exercise governmental authority without creating an alternative political centre inside the Congress?

There is an intriguing counterfactual. Madhavrao Scindia, who died in a plane crash in 2001 at only 56, had been widely regarded as prime-ministerial material and was effectively Sonia's deputy in the Parliamentary party. Had Madhavrao lived, would Manmohan Singh still have been Sonia's choice in 2004?

Her answer would tell us much about how she understood leadership. So would also her account of the UPA arrangement. Critics described her as a "super PM"; admirers argued that the division was perfectly legitimate - Manmohan ran the government while Sonia managed the coalition, party, and political mandate.

Was Sonia's governing philosophy, in essence, economically pragmatic but socially left-of-centre - an "economic right, social left" compact? How much of the UPA's welfare agenda was personally hers? Where did she and Manmohan disagree?
And was she truly the superior power in this partnership - or, privately, in awe of Manmohan Singh's scholarship, integrity, and moral authority?

The 2012 Presidential transition offers another window. There was considerable speculation about whether Manmohan might move to Rashtrapati Bhavan and whether Pranab could replace him as Prime Minister. What options did Sonia actually consider?

These are not drawing-room curiosities. They concern how India was governed.

Rahul Over Priyanka?

Then comes the question of succession: why Rahul before Priyanka?

Was Sonia protecting Priyanka? Was Rahul always regarded as Rajiv's political heir? More importantly, if Rahul was eventually to lead the Congress, why was he never properly apprenticed in government? Why did he not take even a junior ministry in UPA-II, gaining the administrative experience that almost every aspiring Prime Minister requires? And why, after 2009, did Sonia appear unable to renew the Congress organisation even as she continued to manage the coalition?

By 2012-14, when the national tide was turning against the Congress, did Sonia misread the communal and political question? Did the Congress fail to understand how rapidly the language of secularism was being recast by opponents as minority appeasement?

That leads us inevitably to Narendra Modi, about whom Sonia can clarify something important: what was her own political assessment of Modi during the UPA years? Did she consider him a regional adversary, an ideological threat, or a prospective national challenger? What advice did Ahmed Patel give her? Did the Congress underestimate Modi until it was too late?
And what did she make of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first formidable national opponent she encountered after entering active politics? The memoir could be particularly revealing on how a political novice learnt to deal with adversaries who had spent a lifetime in public life while she was still learning the Congress from the inside.

There remain broader questions still, triggered by the title. Was Sonia Gandhi's extraordinary attachment to India essentially an extension of her attachment to Rajiv? Did love for one man become loyalty to his family, then loyalty to his party, and finally, an idea of belonging to his country?

That may, in fact, be the memoir Sonia Gandhi wants to write: not a score-settling political testament but a poignant account of an almost improbable life. There would be considerable power in such a book.

But there is another book waiting inside Belonging - the account of how that reluctant outsider learnt to wield authority; how she survived challenges to her origins, managed powerful men, chose Prime Ministers, held coalitions together, raised political heirs, made errors of judgement, and eventually watched a political order she had helped construct collapse in 2014.

History will want both versions of the book, but Sonia Gandhi's choice will be clear in a few months.

(Rasheed Kidwai is an author, columnist, and conversation curator)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author