Sonia Gandhi: The woman who remained at Congress helm

Apart from guiding the grand old party for the past three decades, Sonia Gandhi has occupied a special place in Indian politics. She has been at the centre of power without ever holding the highest political office of the country. Her upcoming memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love promises to bring forth a personal account of her life that was full of compulsions and sensitivities as she had to fight the "outsider" narrative from rival parties. Therefore the 544-page memoir, which is slated to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 10, holds much significance.

It also comes after Sonia Gandhi’s political leadership in Congress has been bequeathed to Rahul Gandhi, who under his leadership has been successful in pulling the Congress up in 2024 Lok Sabha elections, after the party had been struggling with disappointing electoral performances in 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections.

After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, Sonia initially had remained protective of her privacy. In her memoir, she has mentioned how it was “heartbreak and loss” that eventually pushed her into the public world of politics.

In late 1990s, she took the leadership role of the party that transformed her from being a reluctant politician into a the party's central authority. She became Congress president in 1998 and went on to become its longest-serving president stepping down from the position in 2017. And later in 2019 again, after the Congress's loss in parliamentary elections, she was made the interim president of the party after Rahul resigned from the president's post.

"There are two things associated with Sonia Gandhi who most of the leaders have said about her is she being serious and graceful. Even today, if we talk about opposition parties she is being widely respected and listened to when she is needed," a senior Congress leader said.

In 2004, when Congress-led United Progressive coalition came to power, Sonia Gandhi had emerged as the face of the alliance and was widely expected to become prime minister. Instead, unimaginably, she declined the post and Manmohan Singh was made the prime minister. Which had perhaps for the first time in the country, created unusual duality at the heart of the UPA. The constitutional authority of the prime minister was on one side and on the other the political authority of the Congress president. Interestingly, both existed alongside without challenging the norms and the Congress-led UPA was voted back to power in 2009. The alliance under Manmohan Singh ran the country for a decade.

Sonia Gandhi, during that period, had became a subject of debate precisely because of this arrangement. While her supporters saw her decision to give up the high political office of prime minister as an evidence for her magnanimous decision to give up power. Her detractors questioned the legitimacy of power exercised from outside the government, as she was often accused of controlling the constitutional powers of Singh.

Her memoir therefore has the potential to go back to one of the most debated political decisions of modern India. And how she managed her family and naturalised herself in India politics.