New Delhi: Congress leaders have said critical references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and China were behind Penguin Random House India’s refusal to publish Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love. In an interview with The Guardian, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson said the publishers were “uneasy in general” about the criticism of the government and that the memoir was dropped after she refused to make their suggested changes and deletions.
ThePrint takes a look at what the former Congress chief has said on these critical references in the book that was finally published by HarperCollins.
On China, Gandhi has written that the government has avoided discussing the occupation of Indian territory along the border. “In Parliament, the ruling party evades vitally important affairs: China’s occupation of parts of our territory along the border, legislation that encroaches upon federal principles, minority rights, the privacy of citizens, and many other substantial issues fundamental to our integrity as a nation,” she has written.
Gandhi also criticises the government’s handling of the 2019 Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 paramilitary personnel were killed. “The Modi government had failed to take cognizance of a number of intelligence inputs warning of a possible terrorist attack and inexplicably hadn’t provided the safer air transport requested to move the soldiers. To this day it has not come forward with a clarification.”
On RSS, Gandhi writes that its vision of India is one in which Hindus are supreme and constitutional principles are dismissed. “A contrary vision, articulated by Gandhiji’s contemporary Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founder of the ideology known as Hindutva, views India as primarily a nation where Hindus are supreme—an outlook espoused by the RSS, the BJP, and their numerous affiliates across the country known collectively as the ‘Sangh Parivar’,” she writes.
Gandhi also links Modi’s political outlook to his RSS background, contrasting his vision with that of the Congress. “Narendra Modi’s idea of India was constructed by the ideologues of the RSS and the experience of his own growing up. It affirmed a fundamentalism in which his faith and culture superseded all others. In that India, hierarchy, order, and control are central. He was fighting for his vision of India, and I for mine: an India against hegemony, an India that stands for inclusiveness, secularism, and social justice.”
On the Prime Minister’s repeated attacks on the Congress and Nehru, she writes, “I tend to believe that this antipathy stems from the conditioning of the prime minister by the RSS. It has inculcated in its cadre a commitment to an exclusionary, hardened version of Hinduism that has been crafted into a political agenda.”
“The RSS propaganda machine has worked overtime for decades and seems never to take a day off – down to the present, when its rate of production and distribution has received a huge boost from social media. AI creations and deepfakes now appearing on it are likely to add credibility to its malicious concoctions,” Gandhi has written.
On the government’s adoption of UPA-era welfare schemes, she writes: “It has failed to come forward with any new ideas of governance and instead has adopted no less than thirty of our UPA-era programmes—but retitled under catchier names and considerably reduced in scale; some of these welfare schemes the prime minister himself had earlier criticised.”
She also criticises the inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya ahead of the election, referring to it as a political spectacle. “He brushed aside the advice and warnings of the high priests against premature inauguration and went ahead with a lavish ceremony. The rituals were led by the prime minister himself, with the RSS chief at his side. It was a political spectacle witnessed by the whole country live on national TV and celebrated at every step by the media.”
Criticising the government’s “abuse of power”, Gandhi writes, “Authoritarian regimes respond to popular resistance with increased repression, as India is also undergoing.”
(Edited by Chingkheinganbi Mayengbam)
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