For Sonia, the years that followed were marked by retreat.
At 19, a young woman from a small Italian town, she had met Rajiv, an Indian student, in England. Their relationship took her into a new country and family, and a close bond with Indira followed. India became home through her husband and her mother-in-law.
After Rajiv’s killing, even the public appearances required by the memorial trusts she headed became an ordeal. Before speeches, she feared tears would overwhelm her.
When the Dalai Lama asked whether she felt vengeful towards her husband’s killers, she answered, “No, I don’t,” and burst into sobs. Slowly, she writes, Rajiv became “a presence within me rather than a piercing absence”.
But grief returned at family milestones. At her son Rahul’s Cambridge graduation in 1995, she and her children were overcome by the thought of how proud Rajiv would have been.
Politics, meanwhile, was closing in. The Congress party, the political vehicle of her husband’s family for generations, was losing cohesion and electoral ground. Senior leaders were defecting, and the calls for Sonia to step in were growing louder.
She initially refused. She writes she had seen politics through Rajiv: its achievements, but also its “ambition and greed, hypocrisy and treachery”. “I’d always disliked politics,” she writes. It had taken first her mother-in-law, then “the love of my life, my children’s father”.
Yet the party’s decline began to feel personal. Walking past photographs of Indira and Rajiv, she was seized by “a mixture of pain and guilt”. She feared that the forces they had fought to “protect India’s pluralistic ethos” were gaining ground: a rising Hindu nationalism that, in her view, threatened the “secular and pluralistic vision” of India they had sought to defend.
Congress leaders argued that without her, the party could splinter, leaving little to resist communal politics. The family name, she believed, carried an appeal beyond religion, caste, language and region. This, she says, was “the most compelling argument”.
