Everyone wanted to know about 2004. Sonia Gandhi's memoir reached shelves on Tuesday and the chapter on why she didn't become Prime Minister was the first thing people flipped to, quoted, and argued over.
Her account is messier than the tidy version Congress has told for twenty years. Before the election, she writes, she told one of her children flatly that she would never take the job. Then the UPA won. Allies and senior party colleagues leaned on her, and at some point she said "theek hai", okay, in Hindi. She changed her mind again before Manmohan Singh was named. Rahul and Priyanka wanted no part of it. They had already lost a grandmother and a father to assassins.
Singh, she said in an interview with The Hindu ahead of the launch, led the government while she led the party. It worked, in her telling. She has never sat around wondering what a Sonia Gandhi premiership would have looked like.
The family chapters are where the book gets personal. When Rajiv Gandhi told her he had been asked to become Prime Minister after Indira's assassination in 1984, she begged him to refuse. He told her they would kill him anyway.
Indira Gandhi comes across as formidable. Early in her marriage Sonia was scared of her mother-in-law, she writes, and Indian outlets have pulled out lines about how Indira could freeze a room.
Then there's 1999. Sharad Pawar, P.A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar stood up in a Congress Working Committee meeting and said a person of foreign birth shouldn't hold the country's top offices. Gandhi walked out in tears. She says the office was never the point. What stung was hearing her loyalty to India questioned by people who had urged her into politics in the first place.
Her comments on the Prime Minister are short and cold. She says she has practically no real contact with Modi, and that when the two do meet he tends to look away, "avoiding eye contact". It wasn't always like this, she adds. Leaders from rival parties used to be civil.
The interview went further than the book excerpts. She told The Hindu the last twelve years had done great damage to the country's institutions and said the Election Commission and mainstream media were under the government's thumb. She also said many elections have been stolen. That's her allegation, and the BJP denies it.
She calls the Emergency a dark chapter in independent India's history, and in the same breath says Sanjay Gandhi wasn't the only force behind it. Senior colleagues pressed Indira too, she says, and Indira later called the 1977 election and expressed regret.
The BJP heard a defence. Spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari accused her of trying to justify the Emergency, and other party voices said the book ought to be titled "Whitewashing". Tarun Chugh went a different way. He told Gandhi to remove her "Italian lenses", pointed to economic growth under Modi, and listed Bofors, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the Bhopal gas tragedy as things she should answer for.
Her remarks on the Babri Masjid demolition drew another round. She says she cried watching it on television, and that the Congress had grown complacent about the BJP's rise. Several BJP leaders questioned why she hadn't shown the same grief for other episodes. Congress figures said the entire country had mourned that day.
A few more items are floating around from early coverage, and some come only from headlines, so treat them carefully until the text is in front of you. Reports say she writes about Pranab Mukherjee hinting at prime ministerial ambitions in 2010, and about how the Pulwama attack shaped the 2019 campaign and Rahul's resignation afterwards. Others mention a 2011 breast cancer surgery and her reasons for giving up Italian citizenship.
Before release, Gandhi called it a personal story rather than a political statement. Not many people on the BJP side seem to agree.
The book got an early boost from the Congress itself. Ashok Gehlot and other leaders posted long endorsements on Tuesday morning, and the party shared an excerpt on the PM decision. A bookstore listing puts the HarperCollins edition at Rs 1,039.
