Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi were pulled out of their boarding schools in the middle of their academic term and brought back to Delhi after intelligence reports warned of a plot to kidnap them in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star, their mother and former Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi has written in her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love .
The warning came from RN Kao, a former intelligence chief and security adviser to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who assessed that the children could no longer be protected at their residential schools, Sonia Gandhi wrote in the book. Walking into her mother-in-law’s study after dinner one evening as usual, Sonia Gandhi and her husband, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, were asked by Indira Gandhi to sit down before she addressed them in a more sombre tone. “I want to talk to you both about something that’s been worrying me these past few days.
I’ve been told by Mr Kao that there are reports that the children (Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi) might be kidnapped. He says it’s not possible any longer to keep them safe in their schools; we have to bring them back home,” Indira Gandhi told the couple, according to the memoir.
Rajiv Gandhi also considered the possible political consequences of a potential kidnapping during a volatile period for the government. “While the safety of the children was naturally of paramount importance to us, we had also to consider the disastrous political fallout if something untoward was to happen. He (Rajiv Gandhi) couldn’t allow his mother as prime minister to be held to ransom by forces bent on achieving their ends by any means,” Sonia Gandhi wrote in the memoir.
