As she struggled to come to terms with the loss, her sister urged her to return to Italy. But the Congress leader had made up her mind. She could not imagine leaving India.
More than three decades ago, Sonia Gandhi’s world collapsed when her husband and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in a suicide bombing in Tamil Nadu in May 1991.
“India was my home, my children’s home,” she told The Guardian in an interview published ahead of the release of her memoir, ‘ Belonging: A Journey Of Love’ , on Tuesday.
Priyanka Gandhi, who was also the part of The Guardian interview, recalled what those days were like for her mother. She continues to believe that the larger truth behind his killing has not fully emerged. Sonia Gandhi also recalls how the family had lived with the fear of losing Rajiv after the assassination of her mother-in-law, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in October 1984.
Sitting beside Sonia Gandhi during the interview, the Congress leader said her mother would spend entire days sitting in the dark, listening to Mozart’s Requiem, consumed by grief. “You were angry at him,” Priyanka said looking at her mother, recalling how she would cry and shout: “How has he left me, why did he leave? Sonia Gandhi said she later learnt that intelligence agencies had intercepted threats against her husband before the assassination.
She subsequently declined the post of prime minister. She took over as Congress president in 1998, when the party was struggling with a leadership crisis. Under her leadership, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) won the 2004 Lok Sabha election.
