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.
In what is widely considered her only speech on her personal life, Sonia even compared her life to the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh as she recalled her journey from a middle-class household in northern Italy to India's most important political family.
“It is appropriate that I speak to the theme of my lecture in this fascinating country, because the story I have to tell is a bit like the works of two of your greatest artists. Like Rembrandt’s, it is a story of light and darkness, of mystery and the hidden hand of Destiny. 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.
Meeting Rajiv Gandhi
{{/usCountry}}“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.
Meeting Rajiv Gandhi
{{/usCountry}}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!
Sonia was invited by Ruud Lubbers, a former prime pinister of the Netherlands and a close friend of Rajiv.
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.”
“Yet my father, for all his forbidding ways, was progressive enough to encourage me to learn languages and travel abroad. At school, I learnt of the Risorgimento, of Mazzini and Garibaldi and the unification of Italy. But of India, its great history and its emergence as a modern nation-state, I was taught nothing. My discovery of India happened differently, through the encounter with a remarkable human being. This discovery would take up the rest of my life!” she added.
Start of life in India
Sonia Gandhi admitted that certain aspects of living in a political family had impacted her as a young bride. She had to accustom herself to the public gaze, which she found intrusive and hard to endure. She had to learn to curb her “spontaneity and instinctive bluntness of speech”, and she had to school herself “not to react in the face of falsehood and slander."
"I had to learn to endure them as the rest of the family did,” she said.
Sonia spoke at length about the sensitive and intuitive sides of Indira: how she loved the arts and nature conservation, had a sense of humour, and the ability to laugh at herself.
“In the midst of preoccupation with affairs of state, she never failed to make time for personal concerns—a grandchild’s birthday, the illness of a friend or a relative, the problems of a staff member. Her breadth of spirit was evident: although rooted in a traditional society, she had accepted her son’s decision to marry a girl from a distant land. She opened her heart, her family, and her culture to me, treating me like the daughter she never had. Along with my husband, she guided me patiently through the confusion and hesitations of my early adjustments to India. In time, I came to relish the flavours of India's many cuisines, to feel comfortable in Indian clothes, to speak Hindi, and to acquaint myself with the cultural heritage of my new homeland. The glorious and multi-hued palette of India came to be as dear and precious to me as it was to them,” Sonia said.
First political classroom
According to Sonia, Indira’s first “political classroom” was the 1971 crisis, which she said, “transformed Mrs Gandhi into a statesman.”
Speaking of Indira’s assassination, Sonia said in the speech that she pleaded with Rajiv not to accept the position as Indira’s successor.
“I realised that he had no option. I feared for his life. But his sense of responsibility to the country and to the legacy of his mother and grandfather was too deeply ingrained in him. The life we had chosen was now irrevocably over,” Sonia recalled, adding that she had official duties as the Prime Minister’s wife, but she also had to balance this with family life, bringing up their children and ensuring they had as normal an existence as possible.
Entry in politics
In the speech, Sonia spoke at length about her entry into politics. While she initially resisted the idea, she decided to enter active politics and become the Congress president amid tectonic shifts in society and turbulence in the country. She recalled how new groups and communities were seeking their legitimate shares and old forces sought to polarise and mobilise communities along religious lines.
According to her, they threatened the very essence of India, the diversity of faiths and cultures, languages and ways of life that have sprung from its soil and taken root in it.
“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.
“My journey from the placid backwaters of a contented domestic life to the maelstrom of public life has not been an easy one. Yet, despite its sorrows and difficulties, I have found in my new existence both fulfillment and a larger sense of purpose. The family to which I first pledged my fidelity was in the confines of a home. Today my loyalty embraces a wider family – India, my country, whose people have so generously welcomed me to become one of them,” Sonia concluded.