Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi has said her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, is a personal account of family, loss and finding a home in India, rather than a political book.Writing in The Hindu ahead of its November 10 release in India, Gandhi said she wanted to portray her family as she knew them, including their motivations, struggles and flaws.“This is not a political book. It is a personal one,” she wrote. “Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were.”FROM ITALY TO A LIFE IN INDIAGandhi said love, and the loyalty it brought, connected the different stages of her life, beginning with her meeting with Rajiv Gandhi in England. “It all began in England, where a 19-year-old woman from a small Italian town met a young Indian student,” she wrote.That relationship brought her to India and into a new family, she said, describing her bond with her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and the years spent raising her children. “It also carried me through the unbearable, when I lost first my mother-in-law and then my husband to violence,” she wrote.Gandhi said her love for Rajiv and India sustained her through those losses and brought a sense of duty that eventually drew her into public life, despite her reluctance.WRITING ABOUT A PRIVATE WORLDGandhi said she had guarded her privacy even after entering politics.

Distance from the daily demands of public life eventually allowed her to reflect on her experiences.“For most of my life, I kept my inner world to myself. Even after grief pulled me into politics, I held on to whatever privacy I could, and writing openly about my life felt almost unthinkable,” she wrote.The memoir also recounts the changes she witnessed over more than five decades in India.“I watched a country transform, at first from the margins and later from its very centre,” she said. “This book is my account of that journey, and of the place I came to call home.”INDIA RELEASE ON NOVEMBER 10HarperCollins India will publish the memoir in India on November 10, ending uncertainty over its domestic release following an “impasse” between Gandhi’s representatives and Penguin Random House India.The book covers Sanjay Gandhi’s death in a plane crash, Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991.It also addresses the Congress-led alliance’s victory in 2004, when Sonia Gandhi declined to become prime minister and instead led the party and coalition that governed India for the next decade.- Ends