Sonia Gandhi memoir recounts politics, loss and Modi encounters

Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, was released on November 10, 2026, with personal recollections of family loss and her political life, including her account of limited contact with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. HarperCollins India published the book after Penguin Random House India withdrew from an earlier publishing arrangement.

Gandhi writes that encounters with Modi have largely been limited to formal greetings at parliamentary gatherings. She says he tends to look away during those exchanges, though he has sometimes asked about her health after hospital visits. The memoir presents their differences as ideological as well as political. These descriptions are Gandhi’s account; the reporting does not include a response from Modi.

She traces her own political outlook to the values of liberty and equality that she says she learned from her family. In contrast, she writes that Modi’s worldview was shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, which he joined as a young man and which is the ideological parent of his Bharatiya Janata Party. Gandhi also criticizes his conduct in Parliament and questions aspects of the public image built around his early life....