This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan and The Hindu’s Sobhana K Nair discuss a book that has dominated the news cycle—Sonia Gandhi’s memoir ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’.
Sobhana calls the book “very well written,” with “sparkling prose.” The first 200 pages, she says, have little politics and read more like a portrait of Indira Gandhi than Sonia. Abhinandan points to factual errors, including the founding year of the RSS and the year Ahmed Patel died, and asks how they got past the editors at HarperCollins India. He also remarks that political memoirs are rarely honest while their authors are still in politics.
Manisha says Sonia Gandhi has given so few interviews that the book promises a life worth knowing—one that was once celebrated before the vicious attacks that began around 2013. Anand says he is “quite sure” Sonia Gandhi did not write the book herself and questions whether it can be called an autobiography at all.