DELHI PRESS
Sonia Gandhi Called It ‘Belonging’ — the BJP Calls It ‘Whitewashing’, and Pranab’s Daughter Asks What’s Wrong With Ambition
The Story — Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love was released on Tuesday, November 10, published in India by HarperCollins. In it, she writes that she had decided with her children months before the 2004 election results that she would not become prime minister, and that under the UPA there was an unspoken division of responsibility — Manmohan Singh ran the government, she ran the party.
She also recounts that in 2010 Pranab Mukherjee, after serious differences with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, suggested “perhaps it was time for a change at the top” — which she took as a hint of his long-held desire to become prime minister. The same day, BJP national spokesperson C.R. Kesavan said the book should have been titled “Whitewashing”, and Mukherjee’s daughter Sharmistha defended her father’s ambition on X, saying he held no grudge over the episode.
The Hindu gave the memoir its launch platform rather than covering the launch-day fight: a long pre-release interview by N. Ram that introduces the book as a personal memoir and “a love story at its heart”, leads toward her charge that the BJP-RSS dispensation has done “great damage” to the fabric of the country, and carries her Emergency account — a “dark chapter”, “but it was done constitutionally” — at length and on her terms. No BJP response appears in the interview.
The wire treatment runs the release day as an exhaustive two-sided showdown and a chronicle of the book itself: the BJP’s charges in full, the Congress defence in full, Sharmistha Mukherjee’s defence of her father, opposition reactions in between — and the only chapter-by-chapter walk through the memoir, including a factual error it flags in the book, its dating of Ahmed Patel’s Covid death to 2022 instead of November 25, 2020.
Times Network coverage makes the BJP’s critique the news and the book the background: Kesavan’s retitling leads, his questions over 1984, Batla House and 26/11 follow, and allied voices contest her best-known account — JD(U)’s Sanjay Kumar Jha attributing the 2004 refusal to Mulayam Singh Yadav withholding support, a UP minister alleging President Kalam had reservations about swearing her in. The memoir’s contents arrive only at the end; no Congress defence appears.
Nothing in the book changes any office or vote, but it reopens three live arguments at once — who ran the UPA, whether ambition outside the Gandhi family was ever permissible inside Congress, and whose telling of 1975, 1984 and 1992 stands. What to watch is whether Congress carries the “great damage” charge into the Winter Session — and whether the BJP’s “whitewashing” frame sticks.
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Read More →The day’s biggest stories, all three angles, in one email.
Every story above was covered by outlets across the spectrum. We read all of them, print the facts everyone agrees on, and show you how each side framed it — with their own headlines linked.
Summaries are our own words; headlines belong to their publishers.
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