'They will kill you too': Sonia Gandhi's turbulent journey in Indian politics

On the morning of 31 October 1984, Sonia Gandhi was a young wife and mother, living in the prime minister's residence in Delhi.

Key points

• At her son Rahul's Cambridge graduation in 1995, she and her children were overcome by the thought of how proud Rajiv would have been.
• At 19, a young woman from a small Italian town, she had met Rajiv, an Indian student, in England.
• After Congress's 2004 election victory, the memoir's most dramatic political scene, nevertheless, comes seven years afterwards.
• Sonia goes with Manmohan Singh to meet India's president at the presidential palace in Delhi and formally stake the Congress-led alliance's claim to form a administration.
• It is one of the most searing passages in Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi's new memoir: private devastation unfolding alongside the pressures of public life.

Her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister, had just left for her office in an adjoining building. Moments afterwards, she would be assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, in retaliation for the Indian army's storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine, earlier that year.

Notably, the sound was like firecrackers, but "different". The children's nanny came pounding on the bathroom door, hysterical, pointing towards the garden.

Sonia ran towards the path. A white Ambassador car was moving gradually towards her. Inside, Indira lay covered in blood, her sari stained, her eyes open, her face wearing what Sonia remembered as a look of surprise.

"Mummy, Mummy, " she tried to say. No words came. At the hospital, she waited for hours before a doctor's shake of the head informed her what she feared.

In practice, the ordeal did not end there. Rajiv Gandhi, her husband and the elder son of Indira Gandhi, summoned from a rally in West Bengal, arrived to tell her that party leaders wanted him to become prime minister.

Sonia's response was fury and terror. "They will kill you; they will kill you, too!" she pleaded. As Indira's body lay at home, Rajiv was sworn in, rajiv replied: "They will kill me anyway." That evening.

In practice, the woman who had largely stayed away from politics was now married to India's prime minister, and would eventually find herself at the head of the Congress party, leading it through two general election victories and becoming one of the country's most consequential political figures.

For context, the passage additionally foreshadows another devastating loss. In 1991, Rajiv himself was assassinated. For Sonia, the years that followed were marked by retreat.

At 19, a young woman from a small Italian town, she had met Rajiv, an Indian student, in England. Their relationship took her into a new country and family, and a close bond with Indira followed. India became home through her husband and her mother-in-law.

After Rajiv's killing, even the public appearances required by the memorial trusts she headed became an ordeal. Before speeches, she feared tears would overwhelm her.

When the Dalai Lama asked whether she felt vengeful towards her husband's killers, she answered, "No, I don't, " and burst into sobs. Gradually, she writes, Rajiv became "a presence within me rather than a piercing absence".

But grief returned at family milestones. At her son Rahul's Cambridge graduation in 1995, she and her children were overcome by the thought of how proud Rajiv would have been.

Politics, meanwhile, was closing in. The Congress party, the political vehicle of her husband's family for generations, was losing cohesion and electoral ground. Senior leaders were defecting, and the calls for Sonia to step in were growing louder.

She initially refused. She writes she had seen politics through Rajiv: its achievements, but additionally its "ambition and greed, hypocrisy and treachery". "I'd always disliked politics, " she writes. It had taken first her mother-in-law, then "the love of my life, my children's father".

Yet the party's decline began to feel personal. Walking past photographs of Indira and Rajiv, she was seized by "a mixture of pain and guilt". She feared that the forces they had fought to "protect India's pluralistic ethos" were gaining ground: a rising Hindu nationalism that, in her view, threatened the "secular and pluralistic vision" of India they had sought to defend.

Congress leaders argued that without her, the party could splinter, leaving little to resist communal politics. The family name, she believed, carried an appeal beyond religion, caste, language and region. This, she notes, was "the most compelling argument".

Her doubts were additionally concerning her own credentials. How could an outsider occupy a position held by two formidable figures? At home, Rahul and Priyanka feared losing their mother as they had lost their grandmother and father. Before a New Year holiday, they extracted a promise: "Don't you do anything crazy while we're away."

For context, the "answer", she notes, came through the Bhagavad Gita. Though not religious in adult life, Sonia arranged private lessons with a Sanskrit scholar in January 1997. They read the text verse by verse. She writes that its central message – to perform one's dharma, or duty, without attachment to the fruits of one's actions – eventually resolved her inner conflict.

"I had the answer to my own doubts and questions. I had to step out and go where my duty called. And I did."

After Congress's 2004 election victory, the memoir's most dramatic political scene, nevertheless, comes seven years afterwards. Sonia had led the party's campaign.

Sonia goes with Manmohan Singh to meet India's president at the presidential palace in Delhi and formally stake the Congress-led alliance's claim to form a administration. Everyone assumes she will become prime minister. She notes nothing.

At home, she tells a senior aide she intends to refuse. Party workers gather at the gates; senior colleagues demand a session.

"You fought the election, you led us, " notes one. "Individuals believed in you. How can you let them down like this? Our workers will revolt. You think they'll accept another leader?"

Alliance leaders arrive to persuade her. They surround her, she recalls, and one insists: "We will not take no for an answer." Overwhelmed, she murmurs " Theek hai " – all right. They take it as consent and commence congratulating her.

Her children are appalled, she writes. Rahul storms in: "You said yes?" Her daughter Priyanka urges her not to be forced into a decision.

Sonia writes she spends a long night arguing with herself, friends and family. The risk is not merely personal. She believes the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would continue to exploit her foreign birth and that accepting office would allow the controversy to "create havoc" and hurt the country. By morning she is clear. "I've created up my mind. I'm going to stick to my stand, " she tells Rahul.

She chooses Singh, a trained economist and a party member, instead, describing him as a man "above reproach", with a "deep and consummate understanding of governance".

Meanwhile, the book is at its most revealing when it turns from family memory to the India she believes has been lost.

Sonia notes that when she entered public life there was "a certain decency and decorum in parliamentary politics".

Political attacks and harsh words were not new, but she sees a sharper appetite among those in power "to belittle and torment those who differ from them, to intimidate those they perceive as opponents". It is, she notes, part of a wider international drift towards "a heartlessness that accompanies authoritarian regimes".

Her portrait of prime minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist BJP is unusually direct.

For context, the two have had "practically no real contact", she writes, beyond formal greetings at parliamentary gatherings and occasional exchanges – " Theek hain, aap?" ("Are you all right?") – when she returned from hospital. "He tends to look away, " she notes, "avoiding eye contact."

Modi's idea of India, she writes, was shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and "affirmed a fundamentalism in which his faith and culture superseded all others". His is an India of "hierarchy, order, and control"; hers is "an India against hegemony", standing for "inclusiveness, secularism, and social justice".

There is a striking concession against the backdrop of the polemic – she states she understood Modi's "discomfort with the ruling elite of our times".

Sonia notes she felt uneasy in Delhi's privileged drawing rooms, where political conversation seemed "very far removed from the reality of India".

Modi's origins, she writes, "may not be as humble as his PR team" suggests, but he "had certainly worked his way to power within the RSS from an underprivileged world". It is a rare acknowledgement of the social distance between the Congress establishment and the electorate Modi came to represent.

For context, the memoir additionally offers some glimpses of Sonia's encounters with world leaders.

She remembers Vladimir Putin as an "engaging personality" who took her on a boat ride in St Petersburg, pointing out monuments along the way. She notes she was impressed by his grasp of geopolitics and his "determination to restore Russia to its former powerful status" – "long before the Ukraine war, a different era".

In short, ' They will kill you too' : Sonia Gandhi' s turbulent journey in Indian politics is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.