upcoming memoir is not a political book but a personal one

Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi has said her upcoming memoir is not a political book but a personal one, and asserted that she wanted to portray her family honestly, as people she knew and loved.

Writing in The Hindu ahead of the release of her book ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’, Gandhi said it is her account of the place she came to call home.

“For most of my life, I kept my inner world to myself. Even after grief pulled me into politics, I held on to whatever privacy I could, and writing openly about my life felt almost unthinkable. Only after stepping back from the daily churn of public life could I see my own story clearly,” Gandhi said.

“When I did look back, one thread ran through all of it: love, and the loyalty that grows from it. It all began in England, where a 19-year-old woman from a small Italian town met a young Indian student. It carried me into a new country and a new family, into a deep bond with my mother-in-law, and through the years of raising our children,” she wrote about how ‘Belonging’ came to be.

“It also carried me through the unbearable, when I lost first my mother-in-law and then my husband to violence,” she added.

Gandhi said what remained to sustain her was her love for her husband and for India, the country where she felt she truly belonged.(UPDATED ON 8TH NOVEMBER 2026)