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In the memoir, Sonia Gandhi opens up for the first time about the extraordinary twists and turns of a life that has largely unfolded in full public view. It contains moving glimpses of Gandhi’s private grief. She writes about the loss of her first child, who died shortly after birth, and the chilling discovery of grenades in a room of their house after Operation Blue Star, the 1984 military operation against Sikh separatists at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. She also provides a ringside view of several turbulent chapters in Indian politics, not least the violent assassinations of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, in 1984 and her husband, Rajiv, in 1991.

"Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were, their motivations, their struggles, their very human flaws. I wanted to portray them honestly, as people I knew and loved," the 79-year-old Gandhi wrote said ahead of the release of the memoir.

Her book also revisits some of the darker episodes that have dogged the Gandhi family and the Congress party, including Indira’s imposition of the Emergency in June 1975, a 21-month period during which civil liberties were suspended, political opponents were jailed and the press was gagged, which caused fear and dismay across the country. In Gandhi’s account, it also caused a rift within the family.

Born Sonia Maino in 1946 in a small Italian village near Vicenza, she met Rajiv Gandhi — the grandson of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — at a restaurant in the United Kingdom's Cambridge city. The two got married in New Delhi in 1968, when Rajiv's mother and Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was serving as India's prime minister.

In her book Sonia Gandhi talks about her 2004 decision to not take up the top job as prime minister of the world's largest democracy. The Nehru-Gandhi family gave India three prime ministers.

In an excerpt from the book, Sonia said her children - and now senior Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi - had then discussed with her, their mother's 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,' the excerpt read.

"Neither Rahul nor Priyanka felt that I should become prime minister. 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. They looked relieved and I, too, felt lighter, having said my views out loud on the question for the first time," Sonia wrote in the memoir.

Ultimately, Gandhi’s memoir is a vivid record of six decades of India’s political transformation from the Congress-dominated secular republic she moved to in 1968 until today. Gandhi’s account offers a glimpse of how deep the political polarisation runs in Indian politics today. In one revealing passage, Gandhi writes that she has had “practically no real contact” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 12 years he has led the nation. In fact, at times when the two have been in the same room, such as the Speaker’s small chamber, Modi “tends to look away, avoiding eye contact”, she says. On one occasion, she adds, he has asked briefly about her health after a hospital stay.

After the 2001 terror attack on parliament, Gandhi immediately called then-BJP prime minister AB Vajpayee to enquire about his safety, a gesture he appreciated.

Gandhi sees an increasingly authoritarian style of politics, in which those in power seek to “belittle and torment” opponents. For years, Gandhi’s son, Rahul, has been the subject of BJP’s ridicule, which calls him Pappu, a derisive term intended to portray him as inexperienced and naive. She adds that similar things are happening elsewhere in the world, an observation that can be read in the context of US President Donald Trump’s use of personal insults and ridicule against opponents.

In the book, Gandhi describes a 2012 conversation with Hillary Clinton on the country’s female leaders and their backgrounds. In her recollections of Indira, she shares that, despite wielding authority, Indira could feel besieged and profoundly alone, and this was particularly acute, Gandhi writes, in the months leading up to the declaration of the Emergency by her mother-in-law.

Gandhi also writes of her own isolation, including when she decided to take on the leadership of the Congress out of a sense of duty to her family’s political legacy.

Among the many ways in which Gandhi charts the erosion of India’s democratic conventions in Belonging, one particularly telling shift is the changed relationship between the media and those in power. She recalls a time when journalists had opportunities to question prime ministers directly. In 12 years in power, Modi has not addressed a single press conference on his own. He has sat in on one press briefing at the conclusion of an election campaign and appeared alongside US presidents at joint press encounters after bilateral meetings, where they took questions from the press. Gandhi writes warmly of the closeness between the Gandhi family and that of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, whose parents she lived with when she first moved to India, but she makes no mention of the subsequent estrangement between the two families. In another instance, she does not name the political leader she describes as “thoroughly dishonest” and who she says she trusted in 1999, when Congress unsuccessfully attempted to form a coalition government.