Years before writing her autobiography, ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’, which will hit bookstores on November 10, Sonia Gandhi, the Congress parliamentary party chief, delivered a deeply personal address in The Hague in 2007.
She recalled her early years with the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s home, her resistance to politics, and the assassinations of Rajiv and Indira. Like Rembrandt’s, it is a story of light and darkness, of mystery and the hidden hand of Destiny. In the speech, Sonia spoke at length about her entry into politics. she decided to enter active politics and become the Congress president amid tectonic shifts in society and turbulence in the country While she initially resisted the idea. She recalled how new groups and communities were seeking their legitimate shares and old forces sought to polarise and mobilise communities along religious lines.
Because the story I have to tell is a bit like the works of two of your greatest artists, “It is appropriate that I speak to the theme of my lecture in this fascinating country,.
Like Van Gogh’s, it is also a story of inner struggle and torment, a story of how the experience of loss can impart a deeper meaning to life,” Sonia Gandhi said on June 9, 2007, while speaking on “Living Politics: What India Has Taught Me” at the Nexus Institute. “I was born in Europe, but was soon claimed by another world more diverse and more ancient,” she said, describing how she discovered India not through history or politics, but through her relationship with Rajiv Gandhi. Sonia spoke about meeting Rajiv at a restaurant in Cambridge and even quipped that while the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has said “what grieves and frustrates an Indian most about the prospect of dying is that he will no longer be able to argue back”, she still had a long way to go before becoming the proverbial Argumentative Indian! Speaking about her early life in Italy, Sonia said she was in a “close-knit family typical of its time, conservative and in essence not very different from a traditional Indian family: strong in adherence to values such as loyalty and obedience, to modesty and truthfulness, to generosity and respect for elders.
“The Congress Party was being buffeted by these currents…. Could I stand aside and watch as the forces of bigotry continued in their campaigns to spread division and discord? Could I ignore my own commitment to the values and principles of the family I had married into, values and principles for which they lived and died? Could I betray that legacy and turn away from it? I knew my own limitations, but I could no longer stand aside.
Such were the circumstances under which the life of politics chose me,” she said.
