'They will kill you too': Sonia Gandhi's turbulent journey in Indian politics

What the report says

Sonia Gandhi’s new memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, revisits the personal losses and political decisions that shaped one of India’s most influential public figures, BBC World News reports. The book centers on her life with the Nehru-Gandhi family, including the assassinations of her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her husband Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and how those events pulled her from a private life into the center of Indian politics.

According to BBC World News, Gandhi describes a long period of grief and reluctance before eventually taking a more active role in the Congress party, which had been losing cohesion and electoral support. She writes that she initially disliked politics, but came to see involvement as a duty tied to protecting the party’s secular and pluralist legacy. The memoir also recounts how she was persuaded to lead the party after its 2004 election victory, before choosing Manmohan Singh to become prime minister instead.

The article says the memoir is both a family account and a political statement, offering Gandhi’s view of the Congress tradition, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and what she sees as a harsher political climate in India. BBC World News also notes that she reflects on her limited contact with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and presents her own place in Indian politics as shaped by duty, loss and inheritance.