New Delhi: It was May 1991. A group of men would periodically come to replenish the ice in Rajiv Gandhi’s coffin. When the grieving widow Sonia, her head partly covered by the pallu of her white saree, noticed something that made her stiffen.
“Be careful, please. Don’t hurt him,” Sonia whispered to the men as they opened another container of fresh ice, Javier Moro described the scene in the book The Red Sari (2008).
Just three months ago, Moro wrote, she had spent her twenty-third wedding anniversary with Rajiv in Tehran. Then her life came crashing when Rajiv, then Prime Minister of India, was assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber on 21 May.
The Sonia-Rajiv love story and the tragic abrupt end of their fairytale relationship is etched in Indian minds, especially those who came into adulthood in the last three decades of the 20th century. Their romance, private life and rare public appearances drew the kind of enduring curiosity and fascination with which the British public followed Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Now, the same endless enchantment has resurfaced with Sonia Gandhi releasing her much-awaited memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, published by HarperCollins India. In a recent Instagram Reel, Sonia recounted the story of how she met Rajiv at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge. It is a story that many Indians have read and heard about. It is almost a folk tale for urban Indians, even though Sonia was reclusive and stayed away from the limelight. But photographs of their romance, wedding and outings at India Gate were images that generations of Indians grew up with. Now, the new book is likely to reveal different facets of their relationship that have so far remained hidden from the public eye.
“Sonia and Rajiv were a very private people. They were both introverts and shied away from the public glare. Even when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister, they remained almost apolitical. They would not attend public meetings or parties in Delhi’s social circuit,” said journalist and author Rasheed Kidwai.
When Rajiv and Sonia went for ice cream
The photograph of the two enjoying ice cream near India Gate, in particular, became etched in public memory. The young couple stood beside each other, savouring their ice cream.
The moment even caught the attention of The New York Times, which published an article titled “When Rajiv and Sonia Went for Ice Cream”. The moment was captured by legendary photographer Baldev Kapoor.
“It was very curious when the son of the prime minister married an Italian girl. There was a lot of media interest, and some photographers acted like paparazzi. He didn’t like people sneaking pictures,” Kapoor told The New York Times.
Before Rajiv reluctantly became Prime Minister and the weight of the Nehru-Gandhi political legacy fell on the couple, the two were simply a young couple whose photographs, intimate moments and ordinary outings captured the public imagination.
Their fairy-tale romance came under even more intense scrutiny after Rajiv became PM in 1984, following the assassination of his mother and former prime minister Indira Gandhi. The private became public. And the couple was thrust into the limelight.
“Sonia Gandhi was mostly misunderstood. Her silence was often perceived as a kind of arrogance. Even when she appeared in public, she looked very stern. One of the reasons was that she was constantly tense about Rajiv’s security after Indira Gandhi’s assassination,” said Kidwai.
The Indian media called her an enigma, a mystery, a sphinx and a Mona Lisa-like figure. Her silence found many readings and some misreadings too. For too long she was a private woman trapped in a very public persona. She took a very long time to step into politics. She withdrew into a shell after Rajiv’s assassination. And in those long silent years, she was one of the most watched people in Indian public life.
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‘Mere Pati ko vote do’
Kidwai recalled how Sonia didn’t even know that Rajiv was the grandson of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the son of Indira Gandhi.
“So, when Indira Gandhi visited the UK, a photograph appeared in the newspaper. That’s when she got to know about Rajiv’s background,” said Kidwai.
In his book, Javier said that Sonia was 18 years old when she fell in love with Rajiv.
“That same year she had moved to England to learn English. She was so beautiful that people turned in the street to look at her,” Javier wrote in his book, The Red Sari.
When Rajiv joined politics, she accompanied him during his election campaigns.
“That she would go everywhere was a lie. She would accompany him on his own electoral campaign and would say, ‘Mere Pati ko vote do (Vote for my husband)’,” said Kidwai.
In the decades that followed, she became the subject of relentless innuendo and political barbs because of her Italian roots. But she barely spoke through it all.
And now, with her memoir set to come out, Indians are once again about to discover a life that they’ve heard all about and yet strangely know very little about.
Of course, he was very good-looking. When I first met him, I felt almost immediately that he was someone I would really love to be with,” Sonia said in the Instagram video.
“He was a very gentle-looking person… and that gentleness came through. That was something that really touched me and struck me. I’ll never forget when I first met him.”
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)