DELHI PRESS
Sonia Gandhi Called It ‘Belonging’ — the BJP Calls It ‘Whitewashing’, and Pranab’s Daughter Asks What’s Wrong With Ambition
A memoir released on Tuesday drew a “whitewashing” charge from the BJP and a Congress defence the same day — and a daughter’s defence of her father’s ambition, in public.
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, and gently changed the subject.
The same day, BJP national spokesperson C.R. Kesavan said the book should have been titled “Whitewashing”, accusing it of sugarcoating the Nehru-Gandhi family’s historical wrongs, and Mukherjee’s daughter Sharmistha Mukherjee 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 written interview by N. Ram, published ahead of the release, in which the interviewer introduces the book as a personal memoir and “a love story at its heart”, calls its passages on the RSS, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar among its “most interesting and insightful”, and leads the exchange toward her political charge that “over the last twelve years great damage has been done to the fabric of our country, our democracy and our institutions” by the BJP-RSS dispensation. Her account of the Emergency — a “dark chapter” in which democratic rights were curtailed and habeas corpus suspended, “but it was done constitutionally”, with Indira Gandhi herself later expressing regret — is carried at length and on her terms. No BJP response appears in the interview, and the “whitewashing” charge and the Sharmistha exchange, which broke after it, are not part of this frame.
The wire treatment runs the release day as an exhaustive two-sided showdown and a chronicle of the book itself: it opens by stacking the flashpoints — Babri tears, the Italian passport she found difficult to surrender, a prime minister whose India she says is shaped by the RSS — then gives the BJP’s charges in full (Kesavan’s “whitewashing” line, Giriraj Singh on selective grief, the contested 2004 refusal), the Congress defence in full (Salman Khurshid and Rajeev Shukla invoking Vajpayee’s and Advani’s own regret over the demolition), Sharmistha Mukherjee’s defence of her father, and varied opposition reactions in between, from Owaisi questioning Congress’s own Babri record to Mehbooba Mufti praising Gandhi’s journey. It is also the only treatment that works through the memoir chapter by chapter — power-sharing with Singh, Shah Bano, the DMK alliance — and the only one that flags a factual error 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: its headline is the charge itself, and the piece is built entirely from the attacking side — Kesavan questioning why she wept for the Babri Masjid but, in his telling, not over the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Batla House encounter or the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and calling her contextualising of the 1975 Emergency an attempt to normalise the suspension of fundamental rights. It then adds allied voices contesting her best-known account: JD(U) MP Sanjay Kumar Jha attributing the 2004 refusal to Mulayam Singh Yadav withholding support rather than personal choice, and Uttar Pradesh minister Dinesh Pratap Singh alleging President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had reservations about swearing her in because of her foreign origin. The memoir’s contents are summarised only at the end, in a short neutral coda, and neither a Congress defence nor Sharmistha Mukherjee’s intervention appears in the piece.
The issue — 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 — and both camps can now quote a primary source for lines they already use.
What to watch — Whether Congress leaders amplify the “great damage” charge into the Winter Session, whether the BJP keeps the “whitewashing” frame or lets it drop, and whether Sharmistha Mukherjee’s “dynastic entitlements” line gets picked up beyond this exchange.
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