Sonia Gandhi to mark release of memoir ‘Belonging: A journey of love’ at Delhi event next week

Congress Parliamentary Party chief Sonia Gandhi will hold an event next week to mark the release of her memoir, "Belonging: A journey of love", which hit the stands on Tuesday.

According to people aware of the details, the event will be held on November 16 at ITC Maurya Hotel in the Capital. It will be attended by Gandhi’s children – Congress MPs Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra – and party president Mallikarjun Kharge. Close associates of the Gandhi family have also been invited for the event, the people said.

“It will not be open to all. Guests will be personally invited by the publisher and the Gandhi family,” one of them said, seeking anonymity.

The memoir, published by HarperCollins India, draws a long arc from her birth in Italy, life in the UK and meeting her husband and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, arrival in India and eventual ascension to power.

She is the second leader from the Nehru-Gandhi family to write a memoir after former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “An Autobiography” that was published in 1936.

In the 544-page memoir, Gandhi speaks about her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, and also recounts incidents from the corridors of power.

She also reveals that in 2010, a year after the UPA came back to power, former president Pranab Mukherjee had suggested to her that "it was time for a change at the top". “He shocked me with the suggestion that perhaps it was time for a change at the top, which I understood as a hint of his long-held desire to become prime minister. I gently changed the subject, and though he may have been disappointed, he never made me feel he held it against me,” she says, adding this happened around the time when Mukherjee was having differences with Congress leader P Chidambaram.

Gandhi reveals she has had very little real contact with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while acknowledging some common ground with the Bharatiya Janata Party leader. She also rejects criticism that she was a "back seat driver" during the UPA years.