Kumar Bahukhandi
The cover of Belonging: A Journey of Love, the memoir by Sonia Gandhi. Cover image courtesy of Knopf/Penguin Random House
The former Congress president writes about losing a newborn son, tensions in the Gandhi household and her decision to decline the prime ministership. Her recollection of a conversation with Pranab Mukherjee has drawn a response from his daughter.
Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, went on sale in India on Tuesday, 10 November 2026. Published by HarperCollins India, the book follows her from her childhood in Italy and her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi to the years when she led the Congress. It brings private grief and public decisions into the same account, including her memories of the Gandhi household and her decision to decline the prime ministership in 2004.
Gandhi has described the memoir as a personal account of family, loss and finding a home in India. That purpose is clearest in the passages about experiences she lived through herself. The political passages raise a different question of evidence, particularly when she interprets what others meant in conversations held behind closed doors.
A loss early in her marriage
One of the most intimate episodes in the newspaper account of the memoir concerns the death of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi’s newborn son. Gandhi recalls giving birth prematurely in January 1969 and losing the baby the following day. The clipping reports that Rajiv and his brother Sanjay buried the child at the family’s farmhouse in Mehrauli. Gandhi also revisits the hours in which her family learnt of the bombing that killed Rajiv while he was campaigning in Tamil Nadu on 21 May 1991
Those memories help explain the weight Gandhi gives to her children’s fears in the chapter on the 2004 election. The prospect of becoming prime minister came after both her husband and her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated. In Gandhi’s telling, the decision involved a sense of duty to the party and a family that understood the risks of public office from experience. The Indian Express
The decision to decline the prime ministership
Gandhi writes that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urged her to decline the post after the Congress-led alliance’s victory in 2004. The excerpt describes her weighing their fears against the expectations of colleagues who wanted her to lead the government. She ultimately declined, and Manmohan Singh became prime minister. Pranab Mukherjee’s own memoir records that Gandhi had been chosen as the coalition’s candidate and offered the post to Singh after declining it herself.
What Pranab Mukherjee meant in 2010
The sharpest public response has come over a conversation Gandhi recalls having with Mukherjee in 2010, during Singh’s second term. Gandhi says Mukherjee suggested it might be time for a “change at the top”. She understood the remark as a hint that he had long wanted to become prime minister. She also writes that Mukherjee never held against her the decision to choose Singh in 2004.
Mukherjee’s daughter, Sharmistha Mukherjee, questioned why the possibility of such an ambition should have surprised Gandhi. She argued that her father’s decades in politics and government gave him the credentials to aspire to the office. Her response addresses how that ambition is portrayed. Gandhi’s interpretation remains the account of one participant in a private conversation. Mukherjee went on to serve as President of India from 2012 to 2017.
The Gandhi household after Sanjay’s death
The memoir also revisits Maneka Gandhi’s arrival in the household after marrying Sanjay in 1974 and the deterioration of her relationship with Indira Gandhi after Sanjay died in 1980. Sonia Gandhi describes the disagreements that preceded Maneka’s departure from the family residence. Those passages show how Sonia understood a rupture she witnessed from inside the household. Maneka’s own account would be needed to assess where the two perspectives converge or differ.
Belonging gives readers Sonia Gandhi’s account of how bereavement shaped her family life and how she weighed a decision that changed the course of the Congress-led government. Its passages about other people’s motives carry the uncertainties of private conversations remembered years later. Read alongside public records and the accounts of others involved, the memoir adds an important perspective to events whose consequences extended well beyond the Gandhi household.
