New Delhi: When the 2004 result came in, everyone was certain of one thing. Sonia Gandhi would be prime minister. She wasn't. Now she has said why, in her own words.
In written replies ahead of the launch of her memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love, published by HarperCollins India, Gandhi says that months before the election one of her children asked whether she would take the post if the Congress won. Her answer was "Absolutely not."
After the results, party leaders pressed her. She relented with a "Theek hai" and then changed her mind. She calls the sequence a "surreal drama". Rahul and Priyanka opposed it too, she confirms. Haunted by the assassinations of their grandmother and father, both were convinced the office carried exceptional danger.
The book, 544 pages, is out on November 10. Its India publication had been in doubt for weeks after Penguin Random House India stepped back. She declines to be drawn on that, saying she would prefer not to get involved in the controversy.
She is equally direct on the question that has followed her for 22 years: does she wonder how UPA policy might have differed? "No, not at all. That has never crossed my mind," she says. "We worked as a team, and our roles were distinct with him leading the government and I leading the party."
On entering politics at all, she is plain. "I'd always disliked politics, even during all the years when Rajiv was in public life." After his assassination in 1991 she emerged slowly from seclusion. The Congress could not form a government on its own after the 1996 election and splits followed. She had refused, in 1995, to back a group led by Arjun Singh, N.D. Tiwari and Mohsina Kidwai, who then broke away. G.K. Moopanar, P. Chidambaram and Madhavrao Scindia left the next year, and Mamata Banerjee formed the Trinamool Congress in 1997.
In that period she asked her office to arrange classes at home, without saying why. Professor Vachaspati Upadhyaya, known to the family as Shastriji, agreed to explain the Gita to her. From January 1997 they sat over a Sanskrit edition from Rajiv's shelves, with Hindi and English translations under each verse. The last session was on January 5, 1998.
Rahul and Priyanka, she writes, "argued fiercely" with her because they feared losing her too. Before leaving on a New Year holiday they extracted a promise: don't do anything crazy. Krishna's message, that one must do one's duty without regard for the fruit of action, gave her the answer. "Something awoke in me: I was sure. I had the answer to my own doubts and questions. I had to step out and go where my duty called. And I did."
Sixty years after meeting Rajiv, she writes, she is the same person, only she does not laugh as much as she used to.