What will Sonia Gandhi's memoir reveal about India's most powerful dynasty?
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India correspondent Published 4 hours ago When Sonia Gandhi became president of India's main opposition Congress party in 1998, she was an unlikely and largely enigmatic political leader.
Italian-born and the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, she had spent years avoiding the political spotlight before taking charge of a party that had dominated much of independent India's history.
In her early months, India Today magazine described Sonia as "quite an enigma to her partymen" , external - "inscrutable", shielded from the world by a security cordon and known for her "laconic one-liners in an alien accent".
Yet beneath the reticence, the magazine detected a politician already learning how to exercise power. She listened to competing arguments, gathered information and then made up her own mind. "Nobody is left out of the decision-making process and no voice is gagged. But it is her word that prevails," it reported.
Nearly three decades later, after a political journey that took her from reluctant outsider to the most powerful figure in Congress, India's oldest political party, Sonia Gandhi is offering her own account.
The 79-year-old's story is marked by extraordinary personal loss: she rushed her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, to hospital after her bodyguards shot her, and brought her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, home after a suicide bomber killed him seven years later.
Her autobiography, Belonging: A Journey of Love, which will be published in November by Alfred A Knopf in the US and William Collins in the UK, is likely to be one of the most closely watched political books in India.
In a statement issued through Alfred A Knopf, Gandhi says she wants this memoir "to be a testament of my heart's journey through the tender joys and dark despair that have marked my life".
According to William Collins, the book opens in Cambridge in 1965, where 19-year-old Italian student Sonia Maino falls in love with Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
In this "revelatory" account, the publishers say, the famously reticent Sonia looks back with "warmth and candour" on a life shaped by love, exile, political power and devastating loss - from her childhood in small-town Italy to her unexpected journey into the heart of Indian politics.
The memoir has already become the subject of a publishing dispute in India.
Reports that Penguin Random House India had sought changes , external to parts of the manuscript were followed by allegations from Congress leaders that the publisher had come under political pressure to alter passages critical of the government. Penguin has disputed , external that account, saying it "remained keen and willing to publish the book" while the "relevant discussions" were going on.
Yet readers will be looking for more than the story of how a young, foreign woman married into India's most powerful political family.
They will want answers to some of modern Indian politics' biggest unresolved questions: what drew her into politics, and what happened behind the scenes when the Congress returned to power in 2004 after eight years out of office?
The biggest mystery may be why Sonia, despite having the backing of her party and allies, declined the prime ministership and chose Manmohan Singh, the architect of India's economic liberalisation, instead.
Did she fear that her foreign origins would permanently undermine her government?
"I think that is really the biggest unanswered question. She could easily have become prime minister - she had the full backing of her party and allies, and the president's office had a letter ready inviting her to form the government," says journalist and author Neerja Chowdhury.
In his memoirs, former Congress leader and foreign minister Natwar Singh wrote that Sonia's son Rahul Gandhi was "vehemently" opposed to his mother becoming prime minister, fearing she would meet the fate of his grandmother and father.
Matters reached a "climax", Singh wrote, when Rahul said he was prepared to take "any possible step" to stop her. Will Sonia's memoir shed new light on that extraordinary decision - or offer a very different account of what really happened behind the scenes?
Whatever the reason, her decision transformed Indian politics. But that decision is only one part of a larger mystery: why did Sonia Gandhi enter politics in the first place?
She had spent years resisting a political career. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, she remained largely outside public life. But as the Congress declined through the 1990s, she joined the party in 1997 and became its president less than a year later.
At the time, she was widely dismissed by her rivals. In December 1998, India Today reported that, initially, leading opposition politicians called her little more than a "housewife" or an "Italian wonder" , external . Yet, within months, she had begun transforming her party. One Congress veteran admitted: "I never thought that the lady could spring such a surprise."
The magazine was already detecting a formidable political operator. It described her as having an "iron fist under the velvet glove", and observed that she knew how to "cut down Himalayan egos to the height of foothills".
Then there are the tragedies that made her political career possible.
Sonia witnessed the transformation of her family after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984. Seven years later, she lost Rajiv to a suicide bomber. The deaths changed the course of Indian politics - and her own life.
What will she say about those years? About Rajiv's political career, which she had strongly resisted? About the security fears surrounding her children? And about the moment she decided that the Gandhi family's political inheritance could not simply be abandoned?
Will she discuss Bofors , the scandal that badly damaged Rajiv Gandhi's government and generated decades of controversy around the family's links to Italian businessman Ottavio…
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