NEW YORK (AP) — Sonia Gandhi has a memoir coming out this fall in which she will reflect on the promise and the tragedy of marrying into India’s Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty and on her own career in government.
Alfred A. Knopf announced Tuesday that Gandhi’s “Belonging: A Journey of Love” will be published Nov. 10.
“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,” Sonia Gandhi said in a statement issued through Knopf. “In many ways, this book is a homage to their humanness. My story also offers readers a unique perspective of the social and political changes I have witnessed for six decades in the beautiful country of my belonging.”
Gandhi, 79, is a native of Italy who was studying in Cambridge, England, when she met fellow student and future husband Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and son of India’s first female prime minister, Indira Gandhi.
In “Belonging,” she writes of her life being upended when her mother-in-law is assassinated in 1984 and succeeded by Rajiv Gandhi, who seven years later was also murdered. She too would eventually enter politics and become the longest-serving president of the Indian National Congress Party while also turning down her party’s offer to become prime minister. Her party lost power to current Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party in 2014.
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“It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” she said in her statement.
“Writing about my life did not come easily to me. It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside,” she said. “Yet as I gradually removed myself from the political sphere and looked back at all I had seen, the thread of love and loyalty that wove through my story began to define itself, from the simplicity of my childhood in small-town Italy, to the complexity of my years in India as the wife of Rajiv Gandhi and the daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.”
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The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty remains active in politics. Both of Sonia Gandhi’s children, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, are members of India’s lower house parliament from the Congress party.
