NEW DELHI — Sonia Gandhi had decided months before the 2004 Lok Sabha elections that she would not become prime minister even if her party won, and her children Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra agreed with her, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson writes in her memoir 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', which was released on Tuesday. An excerpt from the book, published by HarperCollins India, was shared with The Indian Express ahead of the release.

Source: The Indian Express excerpt via NewKerala

"Some months before the election, my children and I had discussed the issue of my possible prime ministership. One of them asked me straight out whether I would accept the post, just in case our party pulled off a victory. 'Absolutely not!' I'd said, almost indignantly," she writes. Pressed again — "Are you sure?" — she replied: "I'm very clear."

"Neither Rahul nor Priyanka felt that I should become prime minister," she writes. "They'd lived through the trauma of their grandmother's assassination and the brutal murder of their father. In their minds, holding that office was intrinsically linked with heightened danger." She adds: "Power in itself has never attracted me, nor has position been my goal" — saying her aim was to defend the secular foundation of the nation and its poor, a creed she calls sacred to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

Source: Dainik Jagran English

The night she nearly gave in

The memoir describes how, after the Congress-led alliance won in 2004, alliance leaders gathered at 10 Janpath and pressed her to accept the post. Feeling, in her words, shaken and overpowered, she briefly murmured agreement — recalled in reports of the excerpt as a barely audible "theek hai" — before her children confronted her. Priyanka, who had heard what happened, rushed to find Rahul, and Rahul demanded of his mother: "You said yes?"

A few hours later, she went to Rahul's room and told him she would stand by her original decision. She then sought the Congress Parliamentary Party members' approval to nominate her successor and announced the name of Dr Manmohan Singh, who went on to serve as prime minister for two consecutive terms, from 2004 to 2014.

The memoir traces her life from her 1965 meeting with Rajiv Gandhi at a Cambridge restaurant to her decades at the centre of Indian politics. An earlier excerpt from the same book, reported last week, dealt with the Emergency and Indira Gandhi; this excerpt is the first detailed account of the 2004 decision itself. On release day the BJP criticised the memoir as an attempt at 'whitewashing' the Nehru-Gandhi family's record, according to news agency reports — a charge the Congress has not formally answered in the reports seen so far.

The book went on sale across India on Tuesday. Further excerpts and political reactions are expected as the memoir is read and debated in the coming days.