Congress senior leader Sonia Gandhi yesterday released her new memoir, ‘Belonging: A Journey Of Love’. In it, she has shared memories of her political journey and her personal journey.
In her book, in her remarks about her friendship and association with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she said, “To this day, I have had no real interaction with him in practice. We would meet when, at the end of parliamentary sessions, leaders of major parties would usually gather in the Speaker’s chamber.
It was a very small room, where there would usually be many people. But when he came straight toward me, we would greet each other with a formal namaste. He would mostly avert his gaze. He would avoid meeting my eyes directly.
When speaking in Parliament, he sometimes uses very low-level language, just as he does at public meetings. Most of the time, he harshly criticizes the opposition. This act of his can only be described as a severe verbal barrage,'' he has noted.
At the same time, he has spoken differently about him when referring to his association with the late former Prime Minister Vajpayee. He has said about Vajpayee: ''When the terrorist attack on Parliament took place in 2001, I was worried only about Vajpayee.
As soon as the attack happened, my first thought was concern for the Prime Minister’s safety. So I immediately called him on the phone. I felt relieved when he said that he and I had left the Lok Sabha at almost the same time and that he was safely at home. Later, I learned that he had mentioned to his colleagues with appreciation that I was the first to call him.
When I noticed him in Parliament a few months later, Prime Minister Vajpayee appeared to be in poor health and very aged. There were discussions about this among his party members. Soon, an article about his health problems was also published in Time magazine. While speaking at that joint session of Parliament held in the Central Hall, I felt that perhaps I had gone a little too far. He is a senior leader.
Although we held different views, he was the Prime Minister of the country. I should have been more restrained when criticizing him,” he noted.
In the book, the name of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who was once a close friend of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, appears only three times. There is no mention at all of his wife, Jaya Bachchan.
The broken Amitabh relationship
It has been noted that after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the family relationship between Rajiv Gandhi and Amitabh Bachchan came to an end. At the same time, Sonia Gandhi has mentioned in several places Amitabh Bachchan’s parents, the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Teji Bachchan. She has said that when she first came to India from Italy in 1968, she stayed at Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s house. When Sonia Gandhi fell ill, Teji Bachchan took very good care of her.
Moreover, over the years he gave Sonia Gandhi, who had lost her first son within hours of his birth, many gifts, including a puppy. He has noted that during Sonia Gandhi’s early days in Delhi, Harivansh Rai Bachchan would occasionally give her Hindi lessons and offer her valuable advice.