Can a politician’s memoirs ever be ‘personal’?

This week was eventful for political reporters. Former Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s memoirs, Belonging: A Journey of Love, arrived in the market on Tuesday.

Almost immediately, towering Congress leaders as well as ordinary workers queued up to buy their copies. In typical Indian fashion, at least some of them seemed more keen to be seen with the book at the Bahrisons Booksellers store in central Delhi’s Khan Market, where TV cameras were waiting to interview buyers, than actually reading it.

Like clockwork, spokespersons from the grand old party urged people to leave politics “aside” while reading Sonia Gandhi’s book and see it as “her truth, her life story”. And, to be fair, it is indeed written that way.

The years that Sonia Gandhi has herself spent in the political arena, winning elections and running governments, make up less than a fifth of the book. Most of it is about the lengths that she went to out of her love for Rajiv Gandhi, whom she met when they were students at Cambridge.

While she dotes on her husband throughout, she is quite candid in her sketches of the other Gandhis. Readers get to discover just how domineering Indira Gandhi was, both as prime minister and as the matriarch of the Gandhi household.

Sonia Gandhi’s memoirs give readers some glimpses of...

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