A memoir by senior Congress leader and former party president Sonia Gandhi went on sale on Tuesday, with its pages offering a rare insight by the private politician into how she came from humble Italian origins and went on to become the matriarch of India's most powerful political dynasty — the Nehru-Gandhi family.
The book called "Belonging: A Journey of Love" has been published by HarperCollins India.
"Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were, their motivations, their struggles, their very human flaws. I wanted to portray them honestly, as people I knew and loved," 79-year-old Gandhi wrote in The Hindu daily newspaper earlier this week.
Who is Sonia Gandhi?
Born Sonia Maino in 1946 in a small Italian village near Vicenza, she met Rajiv Gandhi — the grandson of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — at a restaurant in the United Kingdom's Cambridge city.
The two got married in New Delhi in 1968, when Rajiv's mother and Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was serving as India's prime minister.
Nearly two decades later, Sonia would find herself holding her bloodied and dying mother-in-law in her arms following a 1984 assassination that saw Indira's bodyguards shoot her to avenge her suppression of an insurgency that culminated in an army assault, called Operation Blue Star, on the holiest Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple.
Sonia's husband Rajiv Gandhi, a pilot who was propelled into politics after his mother's death, became India's youngest prime minister at 40 years old.
He too was assassinated in a suicide bombing in 1991.
Sonia Gandhi later entered politics, going on to become the longest-serving president of the Congress party.
Sonia Gandhi's book sheds light on India's politically influential Nehru-Gandhi family
The Nehru-Gandhi family gave India three prime ministers. In her book Sonia Gandhi talks about her 2004 decision to not take up the top job as prime minister of the world's largest democracy.
In an excerpt from her book, published in The Indian Express, Sonia said her children — and now senior Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi — had then discussed with her, their mother's possible prime ministership.
"One of them asked me straight out whether I would accept the post, just in case our party pulled off a victory. 'Absolutely not' I'd said, almost indignantly,' the excerpt read.
"Neither Rahul nor Priyanka felt that I should become prime minister. They'd lived through the trauma of their grandmother's assassination and the brutal murder of their father. In their minds, holding that office was intrinsically linked with heightened danger. They looked relieved and I, too, felt lighter, having said my views out loud on the question for the first time," Sonia writes.
Ruling BJP accuses Sonia Gandhi of 'whitewashing'
Sonia Gandhi has said that her memoir is not a "political book" but a "personal" one.
But with the Tuesday launch, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked the Congress veteran.
BJP National spokesperson C R Kesavan said that Sonia Gandhi should have named her book "whitewashing" as he accused the memoir of "sugar coating the historical wrongs perpetrated by the Nehru-Gandhi family."
The book has also been released at a time when the Congress party looks to regain ground against the BJP, with Sonia's son Rahul Gandhi rallying India's opposition parties in a series of protests over the last month.
