Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi refused family entreaties to flee back to Italy following the assassination of her husband, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, in a suicide bombing on May 21, 1991.
She chose to stay. Following the blast in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu—which killed Rajiv Gandhi and 14 others during an election campaign rally—her sister pleaded with her to pack up and leave. Gandhi stood firm against the pressure. "India was my home, my children's home," she stated in an extended interview ahead of the release of her memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey Of Love'. The volume chronicles her trajectory from post-war Italy and her 1968 marriage to Rajiv, through decades of high-stakes political turmoil that redrew the nation's leadership map.
Priyanka Gandhi recounted the raw despair that engulfed their household following the blast carried out by a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam operative. Her mother spent days sitting alone in dark rooms listening to Mozart's Requiem, paralyzed by anguish and sudden abandonment. "You were angry at him," Priyanka said directly to her mother, describing how Sonia wept and shouted, demanding why he had left her behind.
Fear had stalked the family long before that night in Tamil Nadu. After the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984, the couple recognized that political violence shadowed their every public appearance. They grew convinced that an attack on one would inevitably claim both. They went so far as to draft written instructions detailing how they wanted their respective funerals arranged.
Yet the security apparatus failed to stop the fatal blast. Gandhi disclosed that intelligence agencies had intercepted specific threat warnings targeting her husband before the rally, adding that she harbors deep doubts that the entire conspiracy behind his murder will ever come to light. "I don't think we will get the truth now," she said.
She had avoided political office for years. But when the Congress party fractured under a crippling leadership crisis, Gandhi stepped in, taking the helm as Congress president in 1998. Six years later, she steered the United Progressive Alliance to an upset victory in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections before renouncing the prime minister's office. Her memoir arrives in bookstores on November 10, bringing her account of those private griefs and political maneuvers into the public record.