Little real contact with Modi, but there is some common ground: Sonia Gandhi in memoir Belonging
Sonia Gandhi’s book Belonging: A Journey of Love is out, and one of the quieter bits that stands out is what she says about Narendra Modi. For more than ten years the two of them have been on opposite sides of almost every big political fight in the country. Yet she writes that she has had practically no real contact with him at all.
They meet sometimes at semi-official things, like in the Speaker’s chamber. When they come face to face it is just a formal namaste and nothing more. She notes that this is different from the old days, when leaders from different parties still managed a bit of warmth. He tends to look away, she says, avoiding eye contact.
She is clear that the rivalry was never personal. He was pushing his vision of India, she was pushing hers — an India against hegemony, one that stands for inclusiveness, secularism and social justice.
Still, she finds a few places where their experiences sort of meet. She writes that there were parts of his discomfort with the ruling elite of those years that she also understood. She often felt out of place in a Delhi drawing room during political talk, sensing that what people were saying had very little to do with the real India outside. She even notes that he had worked his way up inside the RSS from a modest background.
It is a careful, understated way of putting it. No anger, no soft-pedalling either. The political battle between them has been long and hard. In the book she simply records that their personal meetings stayed rare and strictly formal.
The rest of the memoir covers much more ground — her childhood in Italy, meeting Rajiv in Cambridge, learning to live in India, the losses that changed everything, and the slow pull into politics. She has said more than once that this is a personal book, not a political one. She wanted to write about the people she knew and loved, with all their strengths and flaws. The political parts are there, but they sit inside a larger story of finding a place to belong.
Anyone who has watched the years of confrontation between Congress and the BJP will probably stop at these pages. The formal namaste, the averted eyes, the quiet admission that both of them sometimes felt uneasy among the Delhi elite — it feels like a small, honest window into a relationship that never became personal even while the politics stayed fierce.
Sonia does not claim to know what is in Modi’s mind. She just puts down what little contact there has been and notes the few spots where their experiences of discomfort seemed to overlap. Whether that counts as common ground is for the reader to decide. For her, it was enough to say it plainly.
The book is 544 pages long and takes in a whole lifetime. These few paragraphs about Modi are only a small corner of it. But in a country where every exchange between the two sides is watched closely, even a short account of distant, formal meetings carries weight. She has written it the way she saw it: almost no real contact, a formal greeting when they meet, and a quiet recognition that both, in their own ways, felt out of place in certain rooms in Delhi.
Sources: Hindustan Times reporting on Belonging: A Journey of Love by Sonia Gandhi (HarperCollins India, 2026); related coverage in News18 and Moneycontrol.
Little real contact with Modi, but there is some common ground: Sonia Gandhi in memoir Belonging
Sonia Gandhi’s book Belonging: A Journey of Love is out, and one of the quieter bits that stands out is what she says about Narendra Modi. For more than ten years the two of them have been on opposite sides of almost every big political fight in the country. Yet she writes that she has had practically no real contact with him at all.
They meet sometimes at semi-official things, like in the Speaker’s chamber. When they come face to face it is just a formal namaste and nothing more. She notes that this is different from the old days, when leaders from different parties still managed a bit of warmth. He tends to look away, she says, avoiding eye contact.
She is clear that the rivalry was never personal. He was pushing his vision of India, she was pushing hers — an India against hegemony, one that stands for inclusiveness, secularism and social justice.
Still, she finds a few places where their experiences sort of meet. She writes that there were parts of his discomfort with the ruling elite of those years that she also understood. She often felt out of place in a Delhi drawing room during political talk, sensing that what people were saying had very little to do with the real India outside. She even notes that he had worked his way up inside the RSS from a modest background.
It is a careful, understated way of putting it. No anger, no soft-pedalling either. The political battle between them has been long and hard. In the book she simply records that their personal meetings stayed rare and strictly formal.
The rest of the memoir covers much more ground — her childhood in Italy, meeting Rajiv in Cambridge, learning to live in India, the losses that changed everything, and the slow pull into politics. She has said more than once that this is a personal book, not a political one. She wanted to write about the people she knew and loved, with all their strengths and flaws. The political parts are there, but they sit inside a larger story of finding a place to belong.
Anyone who has watched the years of confrontation between Congress and the BJP will probably stop at these pages. The formal namaste, the averted eyes, the quiet admission that both of them sometimes felt uneasy among the Delhi elite — it feels like a small, honest window into a relationship that never became personal even while the politics stayed fierce.
Sonia does not claim to know what is in Modi’s mind. She just puts down what little contact there has been and notes the few spots where their experiences of discomfort seemed to overlap. Whether that counts as common ground is for the reader to decide. For her, it was enough to say it plainly.
The book is 544 pages long and takes in a whole lifetime. These few paragraphs about Modi are only a small corner of it. But in a country where every exchange between the two sides is watched closely, even a short account of distant, formal meetings carries weight. She has written it the way she saw it: almost no real contact, a formal greeting when they meet, and a quiet recognition that both, in their own ways, felt out of place in certain rooms in Delhi.
Sources: Hindustan Times reporting on Belonging: A Journey of Love by Sonia Gandhi (HarperCollins India, 2026); related coverage in News18 and Moneycontrol.
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