In a rare and deeply personal interview, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has spoken about why she never considered leaving India after the assassination of her husband, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, even though her sister urged her to return to Italy. "India was my home, my children's home," she said, in remarks that offer the most intimate account yet of the private grief and resolve that shaped one of the most consequential political journeys in modern India.
The interview, given to The Guardian and published ahead of the release of her memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', on November 10, traces a life that began far from Indian politics and was pulled, through tragedy, into its very centre. At 79, Sonia Gandhi remains one of the most closely watched figures in Indian public life, and her decision to write about her life in her own words has already generated enormous interest across the political spectrum.
Sonia Gandhi's entry into Indian politics was neither planned nor driven by personal ambition. For years, she remained content with a private life alongside her husband, even as she became part of one of India's most powerful political families. She met Rajiv Gandhi in Cambridge, and their marriage brought her to India in 1968.
What followed was a life lived at close quarters with the most dramatic events in the country's post-Independence history, from the Emergency to two assassinations within the family she had married into.
The interview revisits the fear that shadowed her years as the wife of a prime minister. When Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister after the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi, in October 1984, Sonia Gandhi's overriding fear was that he would be killed next. That fear became reality on May 21, 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber belonging to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during an election campaign in Tamil Nadu.
Recalling the aftermath, Sonia Gandhi struggled to describe how she continued living after his death. She was 44 years old, left to raise her children, Rahul and Priyanka, under the shadow of a violent political inheritance. Her daughter Priyanka, who attended the interview, recalled her mother spending long periods alone, overwhelmed by grief.
The loss left the family devastated, and in the months that followed, relatives encouraged Sonia Gandhi to return to Italy, where she had grown up.
She refused. Leaving India, she said, was never an option. The country was where she had built her marriage, raised her children and buried her husband. It was, in her words, her home and her children's home, and no amount of grief or danger could make her abandon it. The remark captures the central theme of her memoir: belonging, not as a matter of birthplace, but as something earned through love, loss and endurance.
The interview also touches on the questions that have surrounded Rajiv Gandhi's assassination for more than three decades. Sonia Gandhi said she had long feared that her husband would be assassinated after his mother was shot dead by her own bodyguards in October 1984.
She told the newspaper that she later learned Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted threats against Rajiv Gandhi from the LTTE, which opposed India's intervention in Sri Lanka's civil war, and that she believed those warnings had been ignored before he was killed.
She said she continued to believe that questions about a possible wider conspiracy behind the assassination remained unanswered. "I don't think we will get the truth now," she said, expressing doubt that the full truth behind her husband's killing would ever emerge. The remarks are among the most direct she has made on the subject, and they are likely to renew debate about one of the most investigated political assassinations in Indian history.
For years after Rajiv Gandhi's death, Sonia Gandhi stayed away from active politics. Party leaders repeatedly urged her to take charge of the Congress, but she resisted, insisting that politics was not for her. "It was clear in my mind I would never do it," she told The Guardian. "It was just not me." The reluctance was genuine, and it was rooted in the same fear that had governed her life as a prime minister's wife: that politics in India could exact the ultimate price.
She eventually agreed to become Congress president in 1998, a decision she said was driven by a sense of duty towards her late husband rather than any personal political ambition. What followed was one of the longest leadership tenures in the party's history. She remained at the helm of the Congress and the United Progressive Alliance, becoming the longest-serving president in the party's history before stepping down in 2017, when Rahul Gandhi succeeded her.
Under her leadership, the Congress returned to power at the Centre in 2004, defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in a result that surprised most observers. It was in that moment that she took the decision that would define her public image: she declined the prime ministership, despite being elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party.
The refusal, widely discussed at the time, remains one of the most debated decisions in contemporary Indian politics. Natwar Singh, a former minister, has claimed in his autobiography that Rahul Gandhi did not want her to become prime minister because he feared she would be assassinated within six months.
The memoir revisits these episodes alongside her observations of the Emergency, when divisions over the government's actions played out inside her own household, and her account of accompanying Indira Gandhi to hospital after she was shot. She writes as someone who knew the family before becoming a political figure herself, and who watched, from inside, as the country's history unfolded around her.
The book's publication has already stirred political discussion. Sonia Gandhi made her social media debut ahead of its release, taking to Instagram, X and Facebook for the first time to share glimpses from the autobiography, predicting that the book would create a "tamasha". The excerpts and interviews published so far explore why she stayed in India, how her colleagues challenged her leadership, and the prime ministership she turned down.
Her journey from an Italian-born young woman who married into India's first political family to the leader who held the Congress together through some of its most difficult years is, in many ways, the story of modern India itself. She was criticised for being foreign-born despite having made India her home, questioned when she stayed away from politics and attacked when she entered it.
A villager in Haryana once summed up the sentiment of many ordinary Indians, telling a reporter that Sonia Gandhi had come to the country after marriage and become one of its own.
The memoir, scheduled for release on November 10, is expected to be read closely not only for its personal revelations but for what it says about the Congress party's past and its present. Sonia Gandhi's reflections on the decline of the party, her criticism of the current government, and her account of the decisions that shaped her leadership are all likely to feature in the political debate that follows its publication.
For now, the interview's most enduring line is the simplest one. Asked why she did not leave India after losing her husband, she answered that the question never arose. India was her home, and it was her children's home, and that was reason enough to stay. It is a statement of belonging that has defined her life for nearly six decades, and it is the sentiment around which her memoir is built.
(Reporting based on The Indian Express and The Times of India.)