When Sonia Gandhi Chased Away A Palmist: He Made A Prediction As He Ran

Picture this. A man is waving an imprint of someone's palm on a piece of paper at a woman, telling her he can tell the future. The woman does not quite appreciate the idea. He is insistent. She chases him out, yet he says something while scampering out that turns out to be true. A comical scene which, years later, would sound like an omen of tragedy.

The woman here is Sonia Gandhi, and the episode is etched out in her memoir, 'Belonging', which came out on November 10.

The palmist who had entered the Gandhi family's Delhi home in the late 1970s predicted that Sonia's husband Rajiv Gandhi, and not his younger brother Sanjay Gandhi, would one day become prime minister.

The episode took place at Bungalow Number 12 on Willingdon Crescent -- in a part Sonia calls "Baara Number days". Indira Gandhi moved there with her family after losing power in 1977, into a four-bedroom house vacated for her by family friend Mohammad Yunus. The family still calls it "Baara Number".

Rajiv Gandhi was then a commercial pilot with no interest in politics. Sanjay Gandhi was seen as his mother's political heir.

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Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi with a copy of her memoir. Photo: X/@RahulGandhi

'Fat Man Dressed In White'

"Of all the bizarre happenings and unusual characters in 12 Willingdon Crescent, there's one that stands out in my memory," Sonia Gandhi writes.

"One day a fat man dressed in white forced his way onto our side of the house and began calling out to me, brandishing a paper with the imprint of a palm...I didn't believe in astrology, I told him. I asked him politely to leave -- I had no time to waste, I had work to do, I knew my past, and I was not interested in knowing my future," she writes.

When she "flew angrily at him to chase him off", the man turned to run and shouted: "Nahi, nahi, Sanjay nahi -- aapke pati Rajivji ek din pradhan mantri banenge!" ("No, no, not Sanjay, your husband Rajiv will become prime minister one day!")

Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1990. Photo: Getty Images

"Then I saw Rajiv, laughing heartily, with the imprint of the palmist's ink on his palm. He'd been waylaid by the astrologer and humoured him, thinking it was a great joke. I rushed to my room and tried to calm down but burst out crying instead," she writes.

Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in June 1980. Indira Gandhi was assassinated in October 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister hours later. The memoir recalls that he took the post despite Sonia's "tearful pleas". He told her, "They will kill me anyway."

Sanjay Gandhi with his mother Indira Gandhi, who had chosen him as his political heir. Photo: File

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'Bad Omen' Via A Punjab Assassination

Sonia Gandhi says she was not superstitious, though the book records at least one moment when she read a tragedy as a sign. On Rajiv Gandhi's 41st birthday in August 1985, news came during dinner that Akali leader Harchand Singh Longowal had been shot dead in Punjab.

"I couldn't share what was going through my mind, that this was a tragedy but also a bad omen," she writes. "Why on Rajiv's birthday -- was that just a coincidence, I wondered, or a warning?"

When the couple moved to 10 Janpath on February 5, 1990, where Sonia still lives, several of Rajiv Gandhi's colleagues had urged him not to take the house "on the ground that it was inauspicious". Behind the back gate was a mound where an elephant was said to be buried, and opposite it the grave of a Sufi pir. "Neither he nor I were superstitious and laughed it away," she writes. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated 15 months later, in May 1991.