In search of the real Sonia

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The longest interaction I have had with Sonia Gandhi was during Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s state visit to France in 1985 during my two-year stint to write a book on Unesco. It was at the Indian ambassador’s official reception for him in

Paris. Knowing that everyone would make a beeline for him, Bilkees Latif, the ambassador’s astute wife, charged me with keeping Sonia engaged. We exchanged views on many themes, mainly cultural and social in nature, and she struck me as a sensible engaged person modest in demeanour and aware of the world around her.
This was, of course, many years before Rajiv was himself assassinated after assuming office on his mother’s killing, catapulting Sonia, after an interregnum, to the Congress party’s presidency and, on its then perceived unlikely victory to emerge as the largest party in the 2004 general election, making her the country’s most powerful politician.
By any yardstick, the story of an Italian girl going to Britain to polish her English skills, falling in love with Rajiv, then studying in the same university town of Cambridge, and emerging through two family tragedies to achieve her present status is as challenging as it is asking to be written.
Rani Singh has been assiduous in her research, meeting some 100 associates, former officials and commentators in search for the real Sonia — she either did not or could not meet her subject directly. Indian readers will have two kinds of problems with this study. It is primarily written with an international readership in mind and, apart from details about Sonia’s early upbringing in Italy, the author has little new to reveal.
The author’s clinical approach to telling Sonia’s story is off-putting and having been brought up in England and living there for a considerable time shows in her inability to grasp the nuances of India’s domestic and foreign policies. She commits the common fallacy of having the US Seventh Fleet going to the Bay of Bengal, rather than to the region, to intimidate India in the Bangladesh War. And what is one to make of declarations such as: “Rahul is a man of the people…He is now masterful in press conferences…Running the party and the coalition and leaving the government to Manmohan Singh has worked well…Sonia is holding the torch high, waiting for the next generation of Gandhis to take it up”.
Rani Singh has made wrong choices in relying on the commentators and analysts she quotes extensively, choosing flashy writers, rather than those with a deep understanding of the wellsprings of Indian politics and going for those reporting for popular news weeklies.
It must be said in the author’s defence that she was given an almost impossible task by her publishers to flesh out a uniquely private person, despite the nature of the job Sonia came to occupy by a series of tragedies and circumstances. And as one aspiring to be a good wife and mother to her two children, she has displayed a phenomenal reserve of strength to mould herself into what she is. It is with equal resolve that she is seeking to perpetuate the Nehru-Gandhi rule by projecting and positioning son Rahul with an eye on the future.
This book was published before Sonia’s grave illness, which took her to a New York hospital and kept the nature of the illness and the hospital where she was treated under wraps. But it shows the difficulty of getting to grips with a public figure choosing to remain as private as she can.
Perhaps the end product of Rani Singh’s labour is what the publisher wished: to give an international reader a taste of Sonia, rather like Amul butter advertising the taste of India. It is readable, strikes the right notes and gives the reader a quick primer on an amazing subject.
In a rather passionless narrative, I was struck by the author’s evocation of what is today the Indira Museum: “The pale pink cotton sari made of material spun by Jawaharlal when he was in prison hangs close to the entrance along with a shawl: It was the one that Indira, Sonia, and, later, Priyanka all wore at their weddings. The contents of Indira’s bedroom, with a narrow single bed, jug, and angle lamp on the bedside table, the round cane stool that Sonia described her carrying into her room three nights before she was murdered, her many books, and modest photo frames (there are at least five, plus a small pocket travel album on one low bookshelf opposite her bed), are all carefully preserved there”.

The writer is the author of Ink in My Veins: Life in Journalism