Grenades, Grief and Silence: Sonia Gandhi's 'Belonging' Opens a Closed Life

Sonia Gandhi has had "practically no real contact" with Narendra Modi in the 12 years he has led India — that admission anchors her political memoir Belonging, published today, which spans six decades of Indian political transformation from the Congress-dominated secular republic she entered in 1968 to today's Hindu-nationalist ascendancy.

The veteran Congress leader has been fiercely protective of her private world. In Belonging, she writes for the first time about the extraordinary turns of a life largely lived in public view — from a small town in Italy to the highest echelons of Indian power, a journey she says she made for love.

The Guardian's Hannah Ellis-Petersen secured a rare in-person interview with Gandhi to mark publication.

What does the memoir reveal?

The book contains moving glimpses of private grief and political violence:

• Gandhi writes about the loss of her first child, who died shortly after birth.
• She recounts the chilling discovery of grenades in a room of their house after Operation Blue Star, the 1984 military operation against Sikh separatists at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
• She offers a ringside view of the assassinations of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, in 1984, and her husband, Rajiv, in 1991.
• She revisits Indira's imposition of the Emergency in June 1975 — a 21-month period in which civil liberties were suspended, opponents were jailed and the press was gagged. In Gandhi's account, the Emergency also caused a rift within the family.

What does Gandhi say about the political divide?

The polarisation she describes is personal. When the two have shared rooms, such as the speaker's small chamber, Modi "tends to look away, avoiding eye contact", she writes. On occasion, he has asked briefly about her health after a hospital stay.

For Gandhi, this marks a departure from an era when opposing leaders "would treat one another with cordiality". After the 2001 terror attack on parliament, she immediately called the then-BJP prime minister AB Vajpayee to check on his safety — a gesture he appreciated.

She sees an increasingly authoritarian style in which those in power seek to "belittle and torment" opponents. Her son, Rahul, has for years been the target of BJP ridicule as "Pappu", a derisive term implying inexperience. She notes similar patterns abroad — an observation readers can set against US President Donald Trump's use of personal insults.

Is it lonely at the top for India's women leaders?

India has an illustrious history of women in top leadership, long before many other democracies. Gandhi describes a 2012 conversation with Hillary Clinton about their countries' female leaders. Her recollections of Indira are stark: despite wielding authority, Indira could feel besieged and profoundly alone — most acutely in the months before she declared the Emergency.

Gandhi also writes of her own isolation, including her decision to take on the Congress leadership out of duty to her family's political legacy.

What does the book say about the press?

Gandhi charts a telling shift in the relationship between media and power. She recalls when journalists could question prime ministers directly.

In 12 years in power, Modi has not addressed a single press conference on his own. He has sat in on one briefing at the close of an election campaign and appeared alongside US presidents at joint encounters after bilateral meetings. His interactions have largely been one-on-one interviews with sympathetic, pro-government anchors — plus one much-publicised exchange with a Bollywood actor who asked how he liked to eat mangoes.

The publication itself feeds that story. Penguin Random House India withdrew from the project in August. Gandhi told the Guardian the publisher was "uneasy in general with the criticism of the government" and dropped the book after she declined certain suggested edits. Penguin disputes her account, saying the claim it withdrew over refused editorial changes "does not accurately reflect the circumstances". The memoir, released in the US by Alfred A Knopf, is published in India by HarperCollins.

In June, Penguin also pulled out of distributing graphic journalist Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot, about the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal violence, citing an inaccurate map and citation issues. Sacco blamed the "current political climate in India".

How candid is Gandhi, really?

Western political memoirs often name names. David Cameron's 2019 For the Record called Michael Gove "mendacious" and a "foam-flecked Faragist". Gandhi is more restrained. She writes warmly of the Gandhi family's closeness to Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan — whose parents she lived with when she first moved to India — but omits the families' later estrangement. She describes one political leader as "thoroughly dishonest", a figure she trusted in 1999 when Congress failed to form a coalition government, but never names him.

The restraint cuts both ways: the candour about grief and grenades is real, but the silences — on Bachchan, on the unnamed dishonest leader, on Penguin's disputed account — show where even a self-described tell-all stops. What the book changes for readers is the record itself: the most detailed first-person account yet of the Gandhi family's entanglement with India's democratic erosion, published by a house that took over only after another walked away.