Why Penguin Random House dropped Sonia Gandhi’s memoir after she targeted Modi government | Political Pulse News
A reading of Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, ‘Belonging: A Journey Of Love’, makes evident some reasons for the late-stage change of publishers for the title. As first reported by The Indian Express on August 28, 2026, the publisher changed from Penguin Random House (PRH) to HarperCollins due to “changes and deletions” requested by the author.
While PRH later issued a statement saying that such “discussions” were “normal” and they “remained willing and keen to publish the book”, Sonia Gandhi herself has, in a pre-publication interview with The Guardian of London, revealed that it was PRH which had dropped out of the publishing agreement. PRH, she has said, were “uneasy in general with the criticism of the Government”.
Besides the frontal and repeated attacks on the Narendra Modi Government and the RSS which Sonia Gandhi has made mostly in the second half of her memoir, there were also her references to incursions by China which are known to have contributed to the impasse and eventually led to the parting of ways with PRH. While a criticism of the Modi Government (“it is my belief that the ground has (now) shifted under their feet”) is sprinkled across several of the seven sections of the memoirs, the references to the China incursions come towards the end.
“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.”
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Another problematic reference reportedly was to the 2019 Pulwama terror attack where 40 young paramilitary soldiers were killed. Sonia has recalled how “it was a catastrophe that shocked and stunned the nation. 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.”
Besides her criticism, Gandhi has acknowledged that Narendra Modi and she come from very different ideological worlds and background and that his idea of the country was vastly different from hers. She writes, “Narendra Modi’s idea of India was constructed by the ideologies of the RSS and the experience of his own growing up… he was fighting for his vision of India, and I for mine… His path to politics was charted along a course completely different from mine. But there were elements of his discomfort with the ruling elite of our times that I, too, had come to understand well…”
Giving interesting statistics, Gandhi has claimed that the NDA Government has “failed to come forward with any new ideas of governance and, instead, adopted no less than thirty of our UPA-era programmes – but retitled them under catchier names and considerably reduced in scale and that some of these welfare schemes the Prime Minister had himself criticised”.
She has also written that in all, nine elected state governments of the Congress and its allies were overturned by what she describes as “underhand means.” Her reaction to all this: “Indignation and despair filled my heart each time I witnessed the anti-democratic methods by which the Modi regime manipulated and toppled our elected state governments, casting aside the people’s mandates.”
She has, in several chapters, criticised the RSS for their anti- Nehru-Gandhi family stance in Indian politics. She writes, “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.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets his predecessor Manmohan Singh and then Congress president Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi on November 27, 2015.
She writes that she was, naturally, the BJP’s “favourite” target and goes on to describe the nature of the attacks she has faced. “I was, as ever, going to bring ‘Rome Raj’ whatever that was. I was a cabaret dancer, a ‘Monica Lewinsky,’ a spy…”
According to her, by the time of the 2019 elections, when the people’s mood appeared to be changing in the favour of the Congress, the BJP had mastered the propaganda game. Her charge: “By this time the Government, in addition to using mainly human agents to spread its message on social media, had developed a well-funded cyber arsenal, using cyber armies of bots to control narratives and influence voters. In addition, it had in place the mainstream media and the agencies of the state under its control.”
There is also a listing of what she says were the current Government’s “autocratic methods,” for instance, the implementation of the 2016 demonetisation scheme wherein she recalls, “none of the stated objectives of the move were met, while at one blow it threw trade into disarray, shut down vital sectors of the economy and drove millions to hardship. Their misery was compounded by the imposition of a complicated and multilayered tax, GST, which has adversely impacted the backbone of our economy.” She has also been
In her concluding analysis, Gandhi writes that she has no doubt that the long-term design of the RSS of dominance and imposition of one religion, one religion and language will be resisted.
“I sense the next generations yearning for fairness, for doing away with oppressive systems and justice. It will take time, but I know the wheel will turn and they will succeed. They will retrieve the soul of our country and heal its wounds.”
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