Race Course Road, late 1985

Two sentences, one witness, more than thirty years on. They matter less for what they say about Shah Bano than for what they are: her own words, in an argument over policy, with her husband on the other side, and he happened to be a prime minister with the largest majority in the Lok Sabha’s history.

Past the teasing, the first sentence sets a test. Richard Feynman, as his colleague David Goodstein tells it, set himself the same one when he could not explain a hard point of physics to first-year students: ‘That means we really don’t understand it.’ Feynman meant understanding; she meant persuasion. A policy a prime minister cannot defend to one listener in his own house, I think, he will not be able to defend to the country. Call it the convince-me test: plain common sense, and that is its force.3

The case

On 23 April 1985 the Supreme Court decided Mohammed Ahmed Khan vs Shah Bano Begum. Shah Bano had married Mohammed Ahmed Khan, an Indore lawyer, in 1932, and borne him five children. He took a second wife, and in 1975 put her and the children out of the house. In 1978 she went to court for maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which covers any destitute person of any faith, and he divorced her by talaq. A magistrate gave her ₹25 a month; the High Court raised it to ₹179.20. The Supreme Court left the sum alone and held that a husband must keep a divorced wife beyond iddat if she cannot keep herself. The judgment did not stop at the Code. Chief Justice Y.V. Chandrachud, writing for five judges, read the Quran to show that it obliged a husband to provide for a divorced wife, and called it a matter of regret that Article 44 of our Constitution has remained a dead letter: the article that asks the state to work towards a uniform civil code.4

On 10 May, seventeen days later, G.M. Banatwalla, the Muslim League member for Ponnani, moved his bill to amend Sections 125 and 127 in the Lok Sabha. The judgment, he told the House, is in conflict with the rules of the Muslim Personal Law. The bill came back on 26 July and 9 August. Zainul Basher, a Congress member, called it justified, saying the judgment has caused restlessness among the Muslims throughout the country. Abida Ahmed, Congress member for Bareilly and widow of President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, objected to the judges’ reasoning: I do not know why Muslim Personal law is being brought in for no reasons by the Supreme Court. The bill was due back on 23 August, and the government would have to say where it stood.5

Her husband’s first answer

On 15 August, after the Assam Accord and eight days before the bill came back, Rajiv Gandhi asked Arif Mohammed Khan, one of his young Muslim ministers, what he made of the judgment. Khan, who tells the story, defended the court’s judgment, and Rajiv took his side against the clergy and others who opposed it: ‘No, no, we cannot agree to what these people are saying’. He told Khan to answer for the government in the debate on Banatwalla’s bill, speaking first, with the home minister after him. Khan did, on 23 August, and within the hour a letter from the prime minister praising the speech was waiting at his house.

Three months later Rajiv was still holding. In Oman on 17 and 18 November, Khan says, Rajiv took him along in place of the minister listed to go, and told him: ‘Nahi, koi sawaal hi nahin inke saath samjhauta karne ka (No, there is no question of a compromise with these people)’.

The turn

The bill came back on 22 November, and one member had changed his mind. Of Khan’s speech, Saifuddin Soz, the member for Baramulla, said: I tended to agree with him then. Now he wanted to lend full support to the spirit of the Bill.

That day, and again on 3 December, Ziaur Rahman Ansari, a senior Muslim minister in Rajiv’s cabinet, attacked the judgment in the Lok Sabha. In August one of Rajiv’s ministers had defended it; now another attacked it. Writing the next March, after the bill had been introduced, the Times of India read Ansari’s speeches as a signal from the top: ‘that Mr Gandhi gave Mr Ansari the go-ahead signal’.

The woman at the centre of the case was drawn in too. In early December, her youngest son, Jameel Ahmad, told the Hindustan Times in 2011, the family met Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister, in Delhi. The prime minister told them the situation was ‘very critical’. ‘Rajiv asked us to announce that we were refusing the maintenance (awarded by the Supreme Court),’ Jameel said. At a press conference in Indore, Shah Bano gave the money up, saying it was against the shariat, and did not mention the prime minister.

On 16 December Assam elected a new assembly, and seven Lok Sabha and nine assembly seats elsewhere went to by-elections. The Congress lost Assam to the Asom Gana Parishad, a party formed only sixty-seven days earlier, after the Assam Accord, and lost three of the Lok Sabha seats and five of the assembly ones, a year after its landslide. In Bolpur, Siddhartha Shankar Ray lost to Somnath Chatterjee. In Kishanganj the Janata Party’s Syed Shahabuddin won, and said there was no denying the unease in the Muslim mind about the centre’s ambivalence regarding the Shah Bano case. In Assam, A.F. Golam Osmani, whose United Minorities Front had eaten into the Congress’s Muslim vote, put it more sharply: This young, nice prime minister, who wants to be good to everyone, is destroying his party in its 100th year.

That December Tahir Mahmood, a professor of law at Delhi University, briefed the prime minister on Islamic concepts of marriage, divorce and maintenance, and convinced him that a bill to undo the judgment was right. Something else weighed on him. What also bothered Rajiv, in Chowdhury’s telling, was what Sonia had said to him around this time: the remark Tripathi heard.

Soon after the results, seventeen members of the Muslim Personal Law Board met the prime minister, accompanied by Tahir Mahmood and Salman Khurshid. The prime minister told them he wanted to bring the bill immediately as an ordinance, with the centenary celebrations of the Congress in Mumbai only four days away. The party had been founded in Bombay in December 1885, and he was its president. The Board’s draft reached him within hours.

Then the decision was put off by a month. An article in the Pakistan Times had criticised Indian Muslims for insisting that the judgment was against the shariat, and the prime minister asked Najma Heptulla, deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, to look into it. That took a few weeks. On 15 January 1986 the prime minister announced that he would legislate to undo the judgment, at a public meeting at Siri Fort organised by Ziaur Rahman Ansari, the minister who had attacked the judgment in the House.

Where in all this did his wife speak? Tripathi’s sometime towards the end of 1985 cannot say. But the remark carries its own evidence. If you can’t convince me is said to a man who is trying to. I think she was arguing against a course her husband had already taken up.

In the same weeks, on Jameel’s account, the prime minister was asking the woman who had won in court to give the money up. On Tripathi’s, his wife was telling him to stand by the court that had awarded it.

He did not stand by it.

Before Shah Bano

She had stood against her husband’s politics twice before, and lost both times. In 1980 Rajiv told India Today: ‘She (Sonia) is dead against the idea of (my) getting into politics’. He joined the Congress the following May.6

On 31 October 1984, in an anteroom at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, she pleaded with him not to take the prime ministership; Chowdhury has P.C. Alexander walk in and hear her. Her own account of that hour survives, and Rasheed Kidwai quotes it in 24 Akbar Road:

‘I begged him not to let them do this. I pleaded with him, with others around him, too. He would be killed as well. He held my hands, hugged me, tried to soothe my desperation. He had no choice, he said, he would be killed anyway.’

He was sworn in at 6.45 that evening.

In 1980 her husband spoke for her. In 1984 she pleaded for his life. Late in 1985 she argued policy, and the words are her own.

One sentence, two spouses

Chowdhury opens her chapter on Shah Bano, The Secular Prime Minister Who Undermined Secularism, with these two sentences, and a few lines on she gives them a motive: Concerned that the bill should not deprive a poor, aggrieved, divorced Muslim woman of maintenance that was her due, that day Sonia Gandhi was asking her husband not to go in for the Muslim Women’s Bill. Later in the chapter the same words return, now attached to him: He wanted to ensure that a poor, aggrieved, divorced Muslim woman would get a fair sum of money as maintenance to keep body and soul together.

One phrase, two spouses. The motive is Chowdhury’s formula; Tripathi gives us what Sonia Gandhi said, not why.

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The catch

The bill hid a catch. Reading the draft in the law minister’s study, Khan saw that Section 3 required a ‘reasonable and fair provision to be made and paid within the period of iddat’: within, not for. The Board had wanted the husband’s liability to end with iddat; the words, on Khan’s reading, only fixed when the sum was to be settled. The law minister, Ashoke Sen, asked him to keep quiet: ‘None of them has understood this provision.’ Whether the prime minister understood it is disputed. Khan is ‘100 per cent sure’ that Sen never told him; Mani Shankar Aiyar credits the wording to Rajiv Gandhi and his legal advisers.

The bill went to the Lok Sabha on 25 February 1986. Khan resigned that day and would not take it back. Both houses passed it in May. On 28 September 2001 five judges of the Supreme Court read Section 3 as Khan had read it in Sen’s study: the provision ‘extends to the whole life of the divorced wife unless she gets married for a second time’.

It would be easy to call that her vindication. I do not think it is. What she asked her husband for, on Tripathi’s account, was that he stand by the judgment, and Tripathi records nothing of what she thought of Section 3, or whether she knew what, on Khan’s account, Sen had done. The woman the case was named for was beyond any of it. Shah Bano died in 1992, not even being paid the ₹179.20.

The first of February

Tripathi had warned the prime minister himself. ‘This is a disastrous path,’ he told him, and ‘You will lose your credibility.’ He kept at it, warning that ‘It will give an impetus to the RSS and other Hindu organizations’, and when that failed he telephoned Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, both senior leaders of the CPI(M), and asked them to intercede. Thirteen years later, in April 1999, Surjeet would be the man who put her name forward for prime minister, and Basu the man whose government she would refuse.

The visit brought to a head a rivalry between the cousin and the wife. By Nehru’s own account, she had told Rajiv that Nehru was keeping the family under surveillance, and he did not deny it: ‘the security of the PM House was (now) my business’. He blamed her for his break with Rajiv, and in 2001, long after Rajiv dropped him from the cabinet in 1986, he spoke of her as having been ‘the bahu, only packing Indira Gandhi’s clothes for tours’ until ‘she became the maharani’.

Chowdhury tells the locks and the Pope in different places and never joins them. I suspect they belong together. On one day the same man is said to have arranged two things with the same audience in mind: at a courthouse in Faizabad the locks came off, and at an airport in Delhi the person kept out of sight was her.

Tripathi’s account of the whole sequence ends on a sentence Chowdhury prints in quotation marks: ‘That is exactly what happened.’ A warning recalled long after it came true is, perhaps, the kind of memory in which foresight gathers. Uncontradicted is not the same as confirmed.

What the record holds

She lost. Six weeks after Siri Fort the bill was in the Lok Sabha, and the woman the case was named for had already given up the money, on her son’s account at the prime minister’s asking.

Strip away the rest, and what is hers in this story is two sentences. The first, half teasing: ‘Rajiv, if you can’t convince me about this Muslim Women’s Bill, how are you going to convince the country?’ The second, serious: ‘You must stand by the Supreme Court judgment.’ She said them to her husband, in the prime minister’s house, sometime towards the end of 1985. One man heard them, and he gave them to a tape recorder more than three decades later. The motive is Chowdhury’s. The reading of 2001 is the court’s. The words are hers.

In November she tells it herself, in Belonging. Watch for whether the exchange is there, and if it is, whether both sentences survive. A version with only the serious one has tidied the scene. A version that keeps the teasing one has kept what the one witness heard.

A little after nine

A little after nine on the morning of 31 October 1984, Sonia Gandhi was in the prime minister’s house at 1 Safdarjung Road, where she and her husband lived with her mother-in-law. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, had just set out to walk to the bungalow next door, 1 Akbar Road, where she kept her office and where the actor Peter Ustinov was waiting with a television crew to interview her. On the way two of her own security guards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikhs, shot her. Five months earlier she had sent the army into the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

The back seat

M.L. Fotedar, Indira Gandhi’s political secretary, had reached the house a little late that morning and was waiting in the room of her personal assistant, R.K. Dhawan. Told that she had already left for 1 Akbar Road, he got up to follow, heard the shots as he left the house, and ran towards them. Afterwards he was in the car that took her to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, AIIMS. More than thirty years later, in his memoir The Chinar Leaves, he set down where everyone sat:

There was no ambulance available and a car was brought up. Indiraji was in the back seat of the car, with her head in the lap of Sonia Gandhi, who had come running out of the house on hearing the gunshots. Dhawan and I sat in front. We rushed to AIIMS. Before leaving, I gave instructions to trusted personal staff to take care of the children—Priyanka and Rahul—who were in the house.

TIME‘s report a week later puts her in the same place: Sonia cradled Mrs. Gandhi’s head in her lap.

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The eighth floor

At AIIMS, Indira Gandhi was taken up to the operating theatre on the eighth floor, where twelve doctors worked on her and gave her eighty-eight bottles of blood.

Arun Nehru, Rajiv’s cousin and a Congress MP, was soon at the hospital, and Kidwai records what Sonia Gandhi said to him there: She kept telling Arun that Indira had always feared a replay of what had happened to Mujib-ur-Rahman. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first leader, had been killed in August 1975 with most of his family.

Arun Nehru also turned to the succession. By the account of Neerja Chowdhury, then a reporter waiting at the hospital and later the author of a history of how India’s prime ministers decide, he went through the corridor outside the operating theatre speaking to ministers, chief ministers and party leaders, one by one and in small groups, and put forward one name for prime minister: Rajiv’s. The leaders agreed. With the President, Zail Singh, abroad, Arun Nehru wanted the vice president, R. Venkataraman, to swear Rajiv in at once. Fotedar remembers it differently: he says he himself told Arun Nehru to take charge at the hospital, and that the vice president offered to administer the oath.

Downstairs, by soon after noon, the reporters knew that Indira Gandhi was dead. A doctor Chowdhury knew had gone up to the eighth floor, come back, and taken her aside to tell her, in a hushed voice, ‘It’s all over.’ The government said nothing. The BBC, Chowdhury heard later, announced the death just after two.

The anteroom

At the hospital Rajiv went into an anteroom to talk to his wife. P.C. Alexander, Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary, had just heard Arun Nehru press for an immediate swearing-in. Unsure it was lawful while the President was away, he said he would consult Rajiv himself, and reached the anteroom first. Writing seven years later in My Years with Indira Gandhi, he describes what he found:

‘Anguish was written all over his face. Rajiv gently clasped Sonia’s hand and talked to her slowly and intimately. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and she ardently pleaded with him not to agree to be the prime minister. Rajiv was kissing her forehead and trying to convince her he had to accept the office as it was his duty to do so in that hour of grave crisis.’

Alexander tapped Rajiv on the shoulder. Rajiv drew away from her and followed him into the bathroom, where Alexander had a quiet word with him, and Rajiv agreed to wait for the President to return rather than be sworn in by the vice president.

Her own words for that hour, as Kidwai quotes them, probably come from the book about her husband she published in 1992, Rajiv:

‘I begged him not to let them do this. I pleaded with him, with others around him, too. He would be killed as well. He held my hands, hugged me, tried to soothe my desperation. He had no choice, he said, he would be killed anyway.’

I think her fear that afternoon came from the car. That morning she had held the head of her mother-in-law, shot by the prime minister’s own guards. That afternoon she was asking her husband not to become prime minister, because, in her words, he would be killed as well.

Each account gives Rajiv a different reason. To Alexander he spoke of duty. To her he said he had no choice, and would be killed anyway. He may have said both. In his own account, the two of them decided together: ‘I was not happy. I talked with Sonia and she was totally unhappy. However, we discussed it and weighed all the pros and cons and, finally, we decided to accept it.’

The evening

At about five Zail Singh, back from abroad, reached the hospital. Before his car turned in at the gates there had been a commotion, and the reporters found out later that the crowd had stoned it. Word had got out that Indira Gandhi had been shot by her Sikh bodyguards, Chowdhury writes: a precursor to the violent anti-Sikh riots that would soon engulf the city. Over the next three days, by the government’s own estimate, 2,733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi.

That evening the President swore Rajiv Gandhi in as prime minister at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Whatever was said in the anteroom, he took the oath. In 1980, after Sanjay’s death, Rajiv had told India Today: ‘She (Sonia) is dead against the idea of (my) getting into politics’. He went into politics all the same.

Sriperumbudur

Six and a half years later, on the night of 21 May 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at an election rally at Sriperumbudur, in Tamil Nadu.

This week, on 27 October 2026, Sonia Gandhi posted a short video about her memoir, Belonging, which Knopf publishes on 10 November. When my husband was asked to become the prime minister, she says in it, as it was reported, which I was totally against. Forty-two years on, she says the same.

The test for the book is plain: whether she tells of the morning in the car, and whether, in her telling now, the decision of that afternoon was his or theirs.

Her own words are the ones to keep:

‘I begged him not to let them do this. I pleaded with him, with others around him, too. He would be killed as well. He held my hands, hugged me, tried to soothe my desperation. He had no choice, he said, he would be killed anyway.’

The car is Fotedar’s memory, the anteroom Alexander’s. The words are hers.

The iron

A sad iron weighed six or seven pounds. In the Texas Hill Country of the 1930s a farm wife heated several at once on a wood stove, because they cooled fast, and pressed the family’s clothes with them after a day of hauling water by hand from a deep well and washing in tubs outdoors. Many had no wooden handle, and burns were common. Robert Caro gives this a whole chapter, “The Sad Irons”, in The Path to Power, the first volume of his life of Lyndon Johnson, later President of the United States, and Johnson is barely in it.1

That is the method. “I wasn’t interested in writing a biography but in writing about political power,” Caro has said. Only after the reader has felt the weight of the irons does he show Johnson, then a young congressman, pressing the Rural Electrification Administration for a loan to the Pedernales Electric Cooperative, and the lights coming on across the Hill Country in November 1939. In Caro, power is measured by what it does to people who never meet the man who holds it.2

The other side of the day

On the morning of 31 October 1984 the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead in her garden in Delhi by two of her own security guards, both Sikhs. The story of that day is usually told in rooms: the hospital where she was taken, the corridor where Congress leaders, canvassed by Rajiv Gandhi’s cousin Arun Nehru, agreed that her son should succeed her, the hall where he was sworn in that evening. Outside the hospital, the crowd that stoned the car of the President, Zail Singh, himself a Sikh, had started targeting Sikhs, as the reporters waiting there later learnt.3

One of those reporters was Neerja Chowdhury, then with The Statesman, who would write the history How Prime Ministers Decide. By her account, that night meetings were held in different parts of the city by senior men of the Congress, Indira Gandhi’s party, who reportedly sent their supporters out with kerosene, knives and tyres, and with voter lists showing where Sikhs lived.

The killing went on for three days. The government’s own estimate, as Chowdhury gives it, was 2,733 Sikhs killed in Delhi and 3,350 across the country; independent estimates ran from eight thousand to seventeen thousand, in forty cities. For those three days Rajiv Gandhi stayed by his mother’s body at Teen Murti House, where it lay in state. Peace returned to the city only after he had performed her last rites on the banks of the Yamuna on 3 November, and only then, Chowdhury writes, did Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi finally call out the army in Delhi. It was three days too late. There is still no clear answer to why he did not act decisively to stop the killings. She offers two guesses, and marks them as guesses: Maybe Rajiv Gandhi was in a daze. Maybe he was confused about what he should do, leaving everything to Arun Nehru and others.

What she found in the colonies

In the days after, Chowdhury went to Trilokpuri, the worst hit of the Delhi neighbourhoods where Sikhs lived in numbers. Sikh women wailed about how their menfolk had been burnt alive, ‘necklaced’ by burning car tyres, she writes. Her own family had come to Delhi from Pakistan at Partition, and she thought this is what it must have been like in 1947. They spoke about Congressmen leading the mobs that had come to attack them. Then she went on to other colonies:

I discovered, as I visited other colonies, that many Hindus had given shelter to their Sikh neighbours or friends. But some of those very Hindus had gone to other parts of the city to take part in the violence against Sikhs. The first impulse stemmed from the need to maintain social relations, the second was about venting communal hatred. The two could coexist, I learnt during those days.

Not one set of Hindus who sheltered and another who attacked, but, in some cases, the same people: shelter for the Sikh next door, violence against Sikhs in another part of the city. I think this is the most important passage in her account of those days. The organisation she describes, the lists and the kerosene, explains how the mobs were sent. Her finding shows what the lists cannot: how the same person could shelter one Sikh and join the violence against others. I suspect the answer is distance. The Sikh next door was a neighbour with a name. The Sikh across the city was a stranger. Call it the near and the far.4

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The pandemic

Thirty-six years after 1984, in the first weeks of the Covid lockdown, the near showed itself again. In March 2020 Ravi Shankar, a poor Hindu man in the Anand Vihar locality of Bulandshahr, in Uttar Pradesh, died of cancer; with the lockdown keeping people away, his Muslim neighbours carried his body to the cremation ground, chanting, as onlookers reported, Ram naam satya hai. In April, in Indore, the lockdown kept the relatives of Draupadi Bai, a woman of sixty-five, from reaching her house after she died. Her Muslim neighbours carried her bier on their shoulders to the cremation ground, saying they felt it was their duty, because she had shown them much affection when they were children.

The far showed itself too. After an outbreak was traced to a gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary movement, in Delhi in March, Muslims were targeted across the country, and some politicians accused the wider community of spreading the virus. In Deoria, in Uttar Pradesh, a BJP legislator, Suresh Tiwari, was filmed that April telling people that no one should purchase vegetables from miyas, a colloquial word for Muslims. His party said it did not endorse the remark and issued him a notice.

The two years are not alike. In 1984 thousands were killed; in 2020 the far was a boycott call and a stigma. Nor were the people who carried the biers the people who shunned Muslims, as Chowdhury’s sheltering Hindus and attacking Hindus were, in some cases, the same. What recurs, I think, is narrower and still worth naming: in a crisis, the line of faith gave way where people knew each other by name, and held hardest where they did not.

The tree

Back in 1984, on 19 November, at his first rally as prime minister, at the Boat Club in Delhi, held on what would have been his mother’s sixty-seventh birthday, Rajiv Gandhi spoke in Hindi of the violence. Manoj Mitta and H.S. Phoolka, who wrote the history of the killings, render his words: But when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.5

Several prominent Congressmen would later be accused of leading mobs like the ones the women of Trilokpuri described. Thirty-four years on, in December 2018, the Delhi High Court convicted one of them, the former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar, for the killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonment. He died in August 2026, serving a life sentence.

The weight of it

Caro’s irons give electricity its meaning. Chowdhury’s colonies give the decisions of 31 October theirs. Those decisions were taken in a few rooms in Delhi, and their weight fell on streets where a Hindu could shelter the Sikh family next door and join the violence a few miles away.

She put it in one sentence, and it is the one to keep:

The two could coexist, I learnt during those days.

The irons are Caro’s. The finding is Chowdhury’s.

In 2009, by Sanjaya Baru's account, Manmohan Singh told him there could not be two centres of power and that the party president was the centre. The same man had told a press conference in 2004 that the insinuation of two centres was untrue. Both sentences are Baru's record. The ten years between them are this piece.

On the afternoon of Saturday 4 September 2004, in the main hall of Vigyan Bhavan, Manmohan Singh took fifty-two questions from more than five hundred journalists over ninety minutes. It was his first national press conference, a hundred days into office, and Sanjaya Baru, who had staged it, had anticipated fifty-one of the questions. The last came from a woman journalist who asked whether, if pushed against the wall by the compulsions of keeping a coalition together, he might simply put in his papers. 'Well, Madam,' Baru records him answering, 'I believe our government is going to last for full five years, and let there be no doubt or ambiguity about this.' The newspapers, Baru writes, also highlighted another of his assertions that evening: 'The insinuation that there are two separate centres of power is not true.' The Tribune opened its report with the prime minister dismissing as 'without foundation' the charge that the Congress president was the 'super Prime Minister'. The Hindu's headline was 'I am in charge, and will last'.1

Five years later the same man said the opposite to the same witness. Baru had left the prime minister's office in August 2008 and been asked back after the 2009 victory. On 8 August 2009 Singh told him, 'I cannot take you back into the PMO.' Several weeks after that, Baru writes, after he had joined Business Standard, Singh asked why he had not come to see him, and the next day said: 'I am sorry about what happened. You see, you must understand one thing. I have come to terms with this. There cannot be two centres of power. That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party.' Baru adds that he disagreed and did not say so.2

Two sentences, one speaker, one witness, five years apart. The first was said in public to five hundred people and can be checked against the next morning's papers. The second was said in private to a man who had just been refused a job, and rests on his memory alone. Neither is a lie. The question this piece asks is not which was true but what happened in between to turn a denial into a confession, and who, besides Manmohan Singh, had been using the sentence all along.

The first test

Before the denial there had already been a trial of the thing denied, and the prime minister had won it. It happened in his first month, and Baru watched it from inside.

Parliament opened on 2 June 2004, and the BJP would let the new prime minister neither introduce his council of ministers nor make a statement. Singh settled down to tying up the loose ends of government formation. On Baru’s second day in the office he was called in: ‘I have to name a new Planning Commission,’ Singh said. ‘Can you draw up a list of names?’ Some days later Singh asked him who should be deputy chairman, and Baru named Montek Singh Ahluwalia, then at the IMF in Washington. ‘The party has some politicians in mind,’ Singh replied, and gave the names he had been sent: Digvijaya Singh, S.M. Krishna and Veerappa Moily, all former chief ministers, all without a seat in Parliament.

Baru’s reading of the episode is his own: Singh had made up his mind to give Montek the job well before he staged that internal debate within the PMO, and had used his adviser to make the arguments that would fob off the party hopefuls. What is not a reading is the sequence. A name arrived from the party through her aide; the prime minister wanted another; he secured the Left’s general secretary in person and announced his own. In the arrangement’s first month, on the one institution that answered to him alone, the second centre proposed and the first disposed. When Singh told Vigyan Bhavan in September that there were no two centres, he had just won a round against one. Hold the episode in mind, because in 2009 the same man, with a larger mandate, could not keep a minister he did not want out of his Cabinet or bring an adviser he did want back into his office.

Whose sentence it was

The phrase did not belong to the prime minister. Baru uses it in his own voice about the first term, from inside the building: Despite the obvious existence of two centres of power, he writes, he took the view that the office of prime minister was sacrosanct and projected Singh as the coalition’s leader, though Sonia was the leader of the Congress and had been designated chairperson of the UPA. Rasheed Kidwai, revising 24 Akbar Road in 2013 with the government still in office, wrote that the two centres of power will continue to hold sway until 2014, Manmohan with his cabinet and Sonia with the National Advisory Council, and elsewhere calls the arrangement the dual power-centre model.3
The Opposition was using it by September 2004, which is what Singh was denying at Vigyan Bhavan. So when he finally said it to Baru, he was not coining a description. He was conceding one that his own media adviser, the party’s most attentive chronicler and his opponents had all been using for years.

An old question

Nor was the question new. It is as old as the Republic, and the Congress had answered it before, more than once, in ways worth knowing before the rest of this piece.

Acharya Kripalani, Congress president when power was transferred in 1947, demanded to be taken into confidence on the policies of Nehru’s government. Nehru refused, Baru writes, on the ground that ministers under oath and the Official Secrets Act could not show files to anyone outside government, not even to the Congress president, and offered Kripalani a ministry instead. Kripalani resigned in November 1947. His complaint survives in the words Robin Jeffrey quotes, in the volume James Manor edited in 1994, Nehru to the Nineties: ‘I who happen to be President of the organization do not enjoy the confidence of my Colleagues in the Central Cabinet.’ 4 What followed is where Baru compresses and the scholars do not. Baru has Nehru taking the presidency in 1950. In fact three presidents held it in the next four years, Rajendra Prasad, Pattabhi Sitaramayya and Purushottam Das Tandon, who, Kidwai writes, won against Acharya Kriplani ahead of the Nasik AICC session in 1950. It took four years and four Congress presidents, Jeffrey writes, for Nehru to establish this ascendancy. He took the party in September 1951, and the way he did it is Kidwai’s sentence: he got all the CWC members of P.D. Tandon’s team to resign, thus obliging Tandon himself to resign. Tandon’s verdict, as Jeffrey records it: ‘The Congress Party has become the slave of the Government.’5 A prime minister who could not control his party’s elected president emptied the president’s committee until the president went. That was the first answer.

Kidwai draws the rule from it: it became a sort of unwritten norm for the leader of the government to also be the party president or at the least, have a pliable candidate in the post. Jeffrey’s account of the next fifteen years is the same rule in detail. Nehru kept the presidency until November 1954 and handed it to U.N. Dhebar, not a man … likely to question the boundaries laid down by the Prime Minister, who became a model party president: a hard-working go-between who kept the Prime Minister informed about party matters.6 Then, for five years, the rule broke. In 1964, 1966 and 1967, Jeffrey writes, the party’s senior figures had made the Prime Minister: Kamaraj, as president, engineered Shastri’s unanimous election in 1964 and Indira Gandhi’s victory over Morarji Desai, by two to one in a secret ballot, in 1966. On each occasion, the party president … consulted a range of party members … to arrange the succession. It was, in Jeffrey’s word, a period of mutuality, and it ended in 1969, when the party that had made her tried to control her and she split it; from 1969 onwards, she was at pains to ensure that it was the Prime Minister who blew life into a ‘party’. She took the presidency herself after her defeat in 1977 and, unwilling to allow even a catspaw president of the organisation, kept it when she returned to office in 1980; Rajiv Gandhi kept it till his death; Narasimha Rao fought at Tirupati in 1992 to keep it. From 1980 to 1996 the two posts were one.

Who held the party, and who held the government, 1946 to 1977: part one of a two-part table of Congress presidents against prime ministers. 👇

Who held the party, and who held the government, 1978 to 2004: part two, from Indira Gandhi’s return to Sonia Gandhi’s choice of a prime minister. 👇

So on 22 May 2004 the Congress did something it had last done in 1966. A party president made a prime minister. The thirty-five years between were the years of Kidwai's norm: the prime minister held the party, or held a president who would not trouble him, and the one president who had made prime ministers was the reason the norm existed. The difference from Kamaraj is the thing to hold, and it is my reading rather than Jeffrey's or Kidwai's. Kamaraj chose among claimants who had their own bases and had to win a ballot, and he did not keep the party afterwards. She chose a man with no base of his own, by nomination, not likely to be a threat to her or to her children in the words Congress leaders gave Neerja Chowdhury, and she kept the party. That is where the series stood on 22 May 2004. What the next ten years did to it is the rest of this piece.

The office she stood outside

What she chose to stand outside of in May 2004 was not the office Indira Gandhi had held. Under Indira Gandhi the prime ministership drew everything around it into itself. Manor, who watched her emerge from her house on the morning of her 1980 victory and answer a journalist through clenched teeth, ‘I have always been India’s leader’, describes what followed, in the Emergency and again between 1980 and 1984, as a generalised assault on the power and autonomy of most political institutions, including her own party. Jeffrey, in the same volume, gives the measures. Between July 1969 and January 1972 President’s Rule was invoked twelve times, against sixteen in all the years since the Constitution took effect in 1950, and it became a pistol pointed at the heads not only of opposition-run state governments, but of Congress(R) MLAs. Party offices from 1972 became appointments given by the Prime Minister; the Working Committee could go a year without meeting; the Emergency was proclaimed Without consulting the Cabinet; and the party’s president announced that ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’, a sentence Baru also quotes, adding that it showed who the real boss was even when the two posts were separated. The judiciary, in Kidwai’s account of the superseded judges, was to be committed.

Manor’s conclusion came in two stages, and the dates matter. In 1994 he wrote that India had shown the capacity still exists to regenerate damaged political institutions, but that decay still predominates over regeneration as a theme in recent history. In 2017, reviewing Ruparelia’s history of the coalition years, he used the same word with the weight reversed.

Those who complain that the hung parliaments of 1989 to 2014 left India adrift without the decisive leadership that it needs, he wrote, fail to recognise that this era produced two fundamentally important benefits for India’s democracy. First, it brought to an end the era under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi (for all but three of the years between 1971 and 1989) when abuses of prime ministerial power were rife. Second, after 1989, institutions which had been gravely damaged by assaults in that earlier era, especially under Indira Gandhi, acquired considerable power, autonomy, and independence; he lists the courts, the presidency, Parliament and its committees, the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor-General, the states and the federal system. The political process became less tidy, but key institutions and Indian democracy underwent regeneration.

Two cautions travel with the verdict. Manor says the two benefits emerge from Ruparelia’s analysis, and that the book offers arguments of high plausibility rather than rigorous “proofs”. And it is a colleague’s verdict: Ruparelia thanks Manor in his acknowledgements and cites him throughout, and the account of the office that Ruparelia builds on is Manor’s own 1994 volume.

The terms of the bargain

Ruparelia supplies the particulars for this coalition, from the Left’s side of the table. The CPI(M), he writes, helped draft the Common Minimum Programme; the party agreed to participate in a National Advisory Council (NAC) and Coordination Committee to discuss policy and political matters, respectively; the new government endorsed the programme as the National Common Minimum Programme, and the newly established NAC, led by Sonia Gandhi, would oversee its implementation; and the Congress set up a Coordination Committee with the Left, foreshadowing greater collective decision-making.7 On this telling the second centre was coalition architecture. The council existed because a programme had been agreed with parties outside the government and somebody outside the government had to see it kept, and the party president was at its head because she was the person the Left had dealt with.

Baru saw the same council, the same programme and the same committee from inside the prime minister’s office, and read them as something else: as the instruments by which authority was kept while power was delegated. What follows is his account, with Kidwai’s and Pranab Mukherjee’s beside it, and the reader should hold Ruparelia’s terms in one hand while reading it. Two things pull against the frame before it is put down. The testimony from inside runs the other way: the sentence that titles this piece is a prime minister saying the party president is the centre, which is not what one sharer among several would say. And the council is evidence for two centres whichever origin is preferred, Baru’s or the Left’s. The frame explains why the arrangement could last ten years. It does not show that there was only one centre. If anything it shows why there could be two.

The council

The building began within a fortnight. The National Advisory Council was set up on 4 June 2004, Baru writes, with her as chairperson, and the chair carried Cabinet rank, being ‘entitled to the same salary, pay, allowances and other facilities to which a member of the Union Council of Ministers is entitled’.

Baru's reading of the council is a reading, and it is his. The creation of the NAC in June 2004 was the first overt sign to me, he writes, that Sonia's 'renunciation' of power was more of a political tactic than a response to a higher calling. He adds the formulation the September essay in this series built on: while power was delegated, authority was not. He also writes that in practice the council created a parallel policy structure that sought to project Sonia as the voice of civil society and Dr Singh as the representative of government, that Singh never complained about it and that it always seemed to me that he was not too comfortable with it. The discomfort is Baru's impression of another man's state, and seemed is his word. Kidwai reports the same structure from the party's side and lands differently: traditional Congressmen were disappointed that the council rather than the party showcased her as a political leader, and he says why she had to rely on it, which is that the party had failed to act as a political organization.

She gave up the chair in 2006, in the controversy over offices of profit, and Kidwai records what she did next with the law passed to protect her: she waited till the Supreme Court disposed of a petition challenging the law before resuming her post as NAC chief in early 2010. The same passage carries her denial, to Vir Sanghvi on NDTV in October 2006, that she was behind the move to disqualify Jaya Bachchan: 'My nature is not a vindictive one and is not a petty one', she told him.8 Nothing in any of the three books has her explaining the council in her own words. Its charter, its membership and the order that gave it Cabinet rank are all acts, and they are on the record. Her account of why it existed is not.

Ten minutes on a Friday

The council was the public half of the arrangement. The private half, by Baru’s account, was smaller than the word centre suggests. Apart from the weekly meeting of the Congress core group, messages exchanged through two intermediaries, Pulok and Patel, or occasional telephone conversations, he writes, there was not much other regular contact between Dr Singh and Sonia in the early years of UPA-1. The core group met at 7 Race Course Road, initially comprising her, the prime minister, Arjun Singh, A.K. Antony, Mukherjee and Ahmed Patel. Sonia would arrive first and get her exclusive ten minutes with Dr Singh. Only then were the others invited in; Singh rarely spoke in the meeting and took his decisions after having another word with Sonia. The families, he adds, had very little social contact. One thing about this account has to travel with it. Baru records in his introduction that he was not allowed to sit in on the core group. The ten minutes are what he was told, or what he saw from the corridor, not what he witnessed.

Around that meeting an institution stopped. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, which Baru calls the equivalent of a politburo, hardly ever met during Dr Singh’s tenure, and his reason is structural: the prime minister’s non-existent political standing within the Cabinet, and the fact that she, not being a Cabinet minister, was not a member. The core group became the de facto CCPA. A constitutional body was not abolished. It went quiet because the person whose concurrence mattered could not sit in it, and a body she could sit in took its place.

The two intermediaries each carried one kind of traffic. Patel carried the lists: to and fro, the list of names of people to be included or dropped from the council of ministers, and an increase in his visits to the prime minister’s house was almost always a signal of an impending Cabinet reshuffle. Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked on her personal staff and was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia and was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia, and the office’s main link with the council. What passed between them in those meetings Baru describes in a sentence he hedges, and this series does not print the hedged half, in either direction. What he states without hedge is the frequency and the channel. Episode 9 has already printed the rest of this architecture: that portfolios were hers to allocate, which Baru and Mukherjee both saw from opposite ends; that she tried first to place a principal secretary of her own in the office; and that she almost always conveyed serious concerns to the prime minister orally and directly, or through intermediaries, rather than in writing.

So the second centre, as the men inside the first describe it, was a council with Cabinet rank, a Friday meeting, ten minutes before it, two couriers and the ministerial list. Every item on that list is an act somebody saw.

What she said to ministers

The record of her speaking inside that arrangement is thin, and most of it comes from men who were later out. K. Natwar Singh, External Affairs Minister until the Volcker report of 2005, places one scene at 10 Janpath on 22 February 2005. She said, as he quotes her: ‘I shall not be taken for granted. There will come a time when I will do something unpredictable.’ And: ‘You are getting involved in defence deals.’ And: ‘There is a delegation from Africa and you have passed a file on some defence deals to Pranab Mukherjee.’ He is the only witness, he was the man being questioned, and he wrote it nine years later, after she had said in public that he had ‘misused the name of the party’ and that she felt ‘very terribly betrayed’. The words he gives her are checkable against nothing; the date is his; the adjectives he wraps round the scene are not printed here. What the scene shows, if it happened as he says, is a party president putting questions to a Union minister about his conduct in office.9

Mukherjee, who was never out, gives the other kind of scene. In December 2008, he writes, the prime minister told him that Shivraj Patil had resigned and that Sonia Gandhi had suggested that I take over as Home Minister, and that Singh had advised Ms Gandhi against this because Mukherjee was handling a war-like situation at External Affairs. The chain is Mukherjee reporting Singh reporting her, and the suggestion did not prevail.

In 2012, as finance minister, Mukherjee records that Sonia Gandhi, Kapil Sibal and P. Chidambaram also expressed the apprehension that his retrospective tax amendments would create a negative sentiment for foreign investment, and that he proceeded. He is the hero of his own sentence, and I remained resolute is his self-portrait rather than a fact; what survives is that she raised a concern and the amendment went through. A tax amendment is not a transfer of office. But it is the hardest instance in any of these books of her view being heard inside the government and not followed, and it comes from the one witness with no grievance.

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The one instrument

The arrangement was tested once, and the test was the nuclear deal. On 12 October 2007 both of them spoke at the Hindustan Times summit. In answer to Vir Sanghvi’s questions, which Baru says were pre-approved, she said, in Baru’s report, that the survival of the government took precedence over the deal and that the Congress would do nothing to force the issue with the Left; Chowdhury’s fragments of the same session have the Left’s opposition as ‘not unreasonable’.

Singh watched on television at 7 Race Course Road, then went to the same hall and parried: his was not ‘a one-issue government’ and ‘if the deal does not come through, that is not the end of life’. That night, Baru writes, Singh asked him who the wise men were he could turn to, met Baru’s father and K. Subrahmanyam separately, and said to each, ‘She has let me down’. Baru was not in either meeting; the sentence reached him from the two men he had recommended. In the weeks of suspense before this, he records a senior Congress leader known to be close to Sonia answering a journalist’s question about resignation rumours with ‘Let him resign. We have so many others ready to become PM.’ The leader is unnamed.

Chowdhury has, from an anonymous senior Congress leader, an exasperation attributed to her, ‘Oh, the PM and his nuclear deal,’ undated and unwitnessed; the same pages carry what she said on the record at the UPA’s anniversary dinner on 22 May 2008, that his ‘style of functioning is such that it takes a little time to understand’ and that ‘time tells how effective is his leadership’. At the AICC on 17 November 2007, Baru quotes her: ‘Working in a coalition does not mean that the Congress should lose its political space forever.’ Ruparelia quotes a near-identical sentence from a secondary source and places it in 2009, without a date; whether it is one speech or two cannot be settled from the books.10

Then came the instrument. On the night of 17 June 2008, by Baru's account, Singh told her that the government must go to the IAEA for a safeguards agreement, and that if the coalition chose otherwise it would have to find another prime minister to lead the coalition. Sonia requested Dr Singh to sleep on the issue, Baru writes. When, after meeting him the next morning, she realized he was serious, she summoned Pranab Mukherjee.

Baru saw the escort cars outside 7 Race Course Road on his way to work and learned later what the meeting had been. Mukherjee left to tell Karat and Yechury. Montek Singh Ahluwalia went to see her, and admitted to Baru, in Baru's account, that Sonia did request him to convince the PM not to resign. Baru went to Singh's house, found him and his wife reading, and told him that if the deal failed, 'Between Sonia and the NAC, they would say they had done everything.'

Then: Finding the Left adamant, and unable to let Dr Singh go, Sonia Gandhi finally took a call. The government would be allowed to go to the IAEA and complete negotiations on the safeguards agreement.

Two things sit beside that account. Mukherjee wrote a chapter of nearly sixty thousand characters on the nuclear crisis, the Left’s withdrawal and the trust vote, and it contains no summons on the morning of 18 June and one mention of her, in his assessment of what Karat believed. He was the named actor; his habit elsewhere, on my reading of his book, is to record being sent for; and he does not record this. Silence is not denial, and the omission is set against Baru’s account here rather than used to overturn it.

And Chowdhury has Ahluwalia telling her, in 2021, that she rang him when the prime minister talked of resigning, ‘It will be a disaster,’ which Chowdhury places in 2007, a year before Baru’s Montek. Whether she sent for him twice, or one of the two has the year wrong, the books cannot say, and the two are not merged here.

The summer of 2009

On results day, Baru watched Prithviraj Chavan, Singh’s own minister of state in the prime minister’s office, asked on CNN-IBN whether the architect of the victory was Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh. ‘Both!’ Chavan said, and then: ‘This victory is a vote for Rahul Gandhi.’ What followed, in Baru’s telling, was the deflation. Singh stood his ground for a day over the DMK’s A. Raja and yielded. He had been toying with the idea of C. Rangarajan at Finance, and Sonia nipped that hope in the bud by offering the finance portfolio to Pranab, without even consulting him. Mukherjee’s own account of the same summer is gentler and compatible: Sonia Gandhi mentioned to me that it was only appropriate that I continue with finance. Both have the offer as hers. Baru, by then in Singapore, was outside the building for all of it. Kidwai adds, without a source, that she asked A.K. Antony to take Defence.

Then Sharm el-Sheikh, in July, where the BJP attacked the joint statement with Pakistan, which was to be expected, and surprisingly, even shockingly, Baru writes, the Congress criticized its own head of government. Kidwai, from the party side, confirms the act and calls it a self-goal: the party went public, opposing Manmohan’s initiative. And in those same weeks Baru’s own return was blocked, by problems ‘with the party’, in the words his colleague used to him, and then by Singh himself on 8 August. The sentence came a few weeks after that. Baru’s gloss, in his epilogue, is that Singh had been imagining himself to be the victorious Indira of 1971 and made the cardinal mistake of imagining the victory was his; and that when Singh told him there could not be two centres, the subtext was that my return would signal his desire to project himself as PM. That is Baru reading a mind, and it is printed as his reading. What is not a reading is the sequence: a ministerial list he did not control, a public rebuke from his own party, an adviser he could not reappoint, and then the sentence.

After Baru left

For the second term the books thin out, and the witness changes. Kidwai, writing in 2013, has her stepping in twice in the same spring: when Ashwani Kumar’s meeting with the CBI over the coal allocations became public, he writes, Sonia told Manmohan to seek Ashwani’s resignation ‘in the larger interest’, and the prime minister reluctantly gave in; and when Pawan Kumar Bansal would not resign over his nephew’s arrest, once again Sonia had to step in to prevail upon the prime minister to sack him. Kidwai names no source for either, and reluctantly is his. On 22 May 2013, at the government’s fourth anniversary, she said, as Kidwai reports it, that ‘there has been a calculated effort…to deliberately falsify and create innuendo’, and told reporters ‘You Dilliwallahs know nothing about the feelings of the people’; asked whether he felt reassured, Singh said he had always received ‘full cooperation’ from his party president. Her one recorded sentence on the arrangement itself is three words to NDTV, undated, as Kidwai gives them: ‘…we are not competitors.’ The ellipsis is Kidwai’s, and the rest of the sentence is not supplied here.11

Takeaways

The sentence had three owners before it had Singh’s. The Opposition, Baru and Kidwai all used two centres of power as a description. Singh denied it in 2004 and accepted it in 2009, and both are Baru’s record.

The question was older than the government. Kripalani asked to see the files in 1947 and lost; Kamaraj made two prime ministers and did not keep the party; from 1969 the prime minister held the party or held a president who would not trouble him. On 22 May 2004 a party president made a prime minister for the first time since 1966, and kept the party.

The office she stood outside had already been cut down. On Manor’s account, written in 1994 and revised in 2017 with Ruparelia’s evidence, the hung parliaments of 1989 to 2014 ended an era of abuses and restored the institutions around the prime minister. The turn from that to her is this piece’s reading, not his.

The second centre was made of acts. A council with Cabinet rank, a Friday meeting with ten minutes before it, two couriers and the ministerial list are what the men inside the first centre describe. The ten minutes are reported by a man who records that he was not in the room.

She could be moved, once, by one instrument. In June 2008 a prime minister willing to lose the office got his way, on Baru’s account. The man she is said to have summoned wrote a chapter on that week and did not record it.

The verdicts on the second term divide by vantage. Ruparelia’s paralysis and Kidwai’s working-well-enough describe the same years from outside and inside the party.

The test is the book.

Does Belonging use the phrase, and whose does she say it was?

Does it name the National Advisory Council, and say why it was created and why she left its chair in 2006?

Does it tell the morning of 18 June 2008, and if so, who in her telling took the call?

And if the chapter on these years has a prime minister who was never second to anyone, somebody has decided that the sentence of 2009 was never said.

Next week: the eleventh and last Saturday piece, which gathers the ten before it into the tests the book will face.

This series keeps a graded claim ledger behind it. Every correction to a published piece is listed and dated on the corrections page, including the ones that run in my favour.

यह पॉडकास्ट ‘सत्ता के दो केंद्रों’ (two centres of power) वाले ढांचे के संरचनात्मक पहलुओं, ऐतिहासिक उदाहरणों और कामकाज के तरीकों का विश्लेषण करता है। इसी ढांचे ने 2004 से 2014 के बीच, संयुक्त प्रगतिशील गठबंधन (UPA) सरकार के दौरान भारत की राजनीतिक कार्यपालिका (political executive) को परिभाषित किया था।

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इस चर्चा का मुख्य विषय प्रधानमंत्री मनमोहन सिंह द्वारा दिए गए दो परस्पर विरोधी बयानों के बीच के बदलाव को समझना है:

1. सितंबर 2004: कांग्रेस अध्यक्ष सोनिया गांधी के ‘सुपर प्रधानमंत्री’ होने के दावों को सार्वजनिक रूप से खारिज करते हुए उन्होंने कहा था, “यह कहना कि सत्ता के दो अलग-अलग केंद्र हैं, सच नहीं है।”

2. अगस्त-सितंबर 2009: अपने पूर्व मीडिया सलाहकार संजय बारू के सामने उन्होंने निजी तौर पर स्वीकार किया: “सत्ता के दो केंद्र नहीं हो सकते। इससे भ्रम पैदा होता है। मुझे यह मानना ​​होगा कि पार्टी अध्यक्ष ही सत्ता का केंद्र हैं। सरकार पार्टी के प्रति जवाबदेह है।”

अस्वीकार करने से लेकर स्वीकार करने तक के इस बदलाव में कई चीजें शामिल थीं—जैसे कि संस्थागत ढांचे (जैसे राष्ट्रीय सलाहकार परिषद और कांग्रेस कोर ग्रुप), कामकाज के विशेष तरीके (जैसे तय किए गए राजनीतिक दूत और संयुक्त सचिव स्तर की निगरानी), और कुछ अहम राजनीतिक मोड़—खासकर कैबिनेट में नियुक्तियां, 2008 का भारत-अमेरिका परमाणु समझौता, और 2009 के आम चुनावों के बाद की स्थितियां।

The night of the vote

On 17 April 1999 the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee fell by a single vote, 269 to 270. Three days earlier Jayalalithaa had come to Delhi and pulled her AIADMK out of it. Even so, the government expected to survive, because the BSP had said its five members would abstain. At the last minute they voted against it, and two sick BJP members wheeled in to vote could not make up the difference.

Coffee at Gujral’s

The same day she went to the house of I.K. Gujral, the former prime minister, for coffee. She wanted his support, and he gave it, with a warning: the Left would let her down, and it had another man in mind for the top job, should there be a deadlock: Jyoti Basu. Gujral, writing with hindsight in his 2011 memoir Matters of Discretion, recalls:

Sonia came over to my residence on 20 April 1999 for a cup of coffee. Hers was basically a courtesy call to ask for my support. I told her very frankly that while I would support her candidature for prime ministership, she would be let down by her friends in the Left at the last moment. I added that she was being naïve if she thought that Surjeet was seriously backing her. In fact, their ‘hidden horse’ was Jyoti Basu who had been convinced by Surjeet to enter the fray for the top post in case of a deadlock.

Two hundred and seventy-two

On 21 April she spent half an hour with the President, then came out to speak to the press. The Congress, she said, would form an alternative government with support from outside. Her party had the support of 272 members of the Lok Sabha, and she would give the President their names within two days. Asked about Mulayam Singh Yadav, who was said to be unwilling to back her, she said: We have reports that he has not made up his mind but we are confident of getting his support. Clarifying further, she said the Congress had played no part in the government’s fall: The BJP government fell under its own weight.

It sits oddly that four days earlier her own Working Committee had recorded its appreciation of her part in bringing it down.

The names were the whole question. She had 272 in speech and not on paper. She had said that, as required, she would go back to the parties, collect their letters and report to the President in two days. The one name that mattered most was already slipping. That same day, Gujral says, Mulayam, who had been professing to support her, suddenly did a volte-face, and told the press his Samajwadi Party would not back the Congress.

What she wanted

Did she want the office for herself? In the day’s report she claimed the government for the Congress and left its leader unnamed. Everyone around her assumed it would be her. The reporters’ question was whether Mulayam would back her for prime ministership. The letter Pawar was gathering signatures for, Rasheed Kidwai writes, had made it clear that Sonia would be the prime ministerial candidate. Pawar had hoped for something else, Neerja Chowdhury writes: he believed he could count on the inexperienced Sonia’s support to form the next government, and the journalist Kumar Ketkar told her: He thought Sonia Gandhi would bless him. There were MPs who told me that I should stake a claim, Pawar said. But Sonia Gandhi went to KR Narayanan, and staked the claim herself.

It is not hard to see why she might think the party, and perhaps the country, was hers. Ever since 1991 she had been, in Neerja Chowdhury’s phrase, a leader in reserve. When she came out of reserve to campaign in 1998, for a party that had asked her to, her managers were busy finalizing the venues for her debut and consulting astrologers, Kidwai writes. At Sriperumbudur, where her husband had been killed, the curious multitude turned out in droves to see her, and when Priyanka spoke a single sentence in Tamil the crowd shouted back, ‘Our future leader!’ Prospective candidates from all over pleaded with them to visit their constituency too. Sonia was seen as the saviour of the Congress. In Kidwai’s phrase, ‘Indira II’ was in the making.

She went to a hundred and fifty-odd constituencies, by his count, and the Congress won 141 seats. Her managers blamed the organisation, not her, and by March 1998 she had the party itself.

Pawar, on Chowdhury’s account, counted on her inexperience; her managers, on Kidwai’s, were building Indira II. I think she wanted the office, and believed the party’s arithmetic would carry her there. The smirk in Tavleen Singh’s forecourt fits that reading, though it is a critic’s description, written after the defeat.

Only M.L. Fotedar says otherwise. Writing to her in 2006, in a letter he later printed in his memoir The Chinar Leaves, he reminded her that in April 1999 she had told him she wanted Manmohan Singh as prime minister. No one else records it. And the same paragraph has her already a member of the Lok Sabha and Leader of the Opposition before the government fell, when she entered the House only that October: a measure of the care he gave to a matter of some weight.

The parties and their letters

Over the next three days the President saw the parties himself. On paper, Gujral’s warning about the Left was not borne out: the CPI(M) and the CPI gave the President their unconditional support for a government led by the Congress. The RPI, Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK, the Janata Party and Laloo Prasad Yadav’s RJD gave him letters. Mulayam came with his general secretary, Amar Singh. Gujral was wrong about who would let her down, and right that she would be let down.

Why Mulayam turned has never been settled, but a columnist at the time looked to Uttar Pradesh. Mulayam had built his base there by weaning Muslim votes away from the Congress, Harihar Swarup wrote in The Tribune on 2 May, and Mulayam feared, his Muslim votes would dwindle and his party might become redundant. A survey of the year by the political scientist Devesh Kapur adds that he reportedly had an informal understanding with Kalyan Singh, the BJP’s chief minister in Lucknow. The other side was grateful. Vijay Goel, a BJP MP from Delhi, said that Mulayam sided with us in ensuring that Sonia Gandhi did not become the Prime Minister, and George Fernandes, whom a Tribune gossip column had at a two-hour breakfast with Mulayam on 20 April, joined in the thanks.

Fotedar looked inside the Congress. Madhavrao Scindia, he wrote to her in 2006, and some of his associates in the party came in the way, for reasons best known to them. By the time of The Chinar Leaves, the reasons were no longer best known only to them. Scindia, who had prime ministerial ambitions, used his friend Amar Singh to make Mulayam Singh Yadav change his mind. Amar Singh, the President’s record shows, was at Mulayam’s side when the Samajwadi Party called at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Jyoti Basu, recalling the week for an oral history, gave Mulayam’s thinking as he remembered it:

Mulayam Singh said: I cannot support the Congress government. Then I asked him: Why did you vote against the BJP? He said: the alternative is you. (It is ridiculous, that I become Prime Minister.) I said: Why should the Congress accept me? Those days are over, no more there.

That is the nearest the record comes to Mulayam’s own words that week, and it comes through Basu.

The door she closed

On 22 April, Gujral writes, the Samajwadi Party put up another name: Jyoti Basu’s. The Congress gave its answer twice, and Basu remembered both. First Pranab Mukherjee and Arjun Singh, with others, came to his house to tell him the party would form the government on our own. Then Sonia Gandhi telephoned him herself. My working committee has already taken a decision, she said, as he recalled it, either we form the government or nothing happens. We cannot support the alternative suggested. Basu’s reply was two words: very good.

This is where the week turned. Until that call she had been asking for support; now she was refusing it. A Basu government, kept in office by the Congress from outside, was the only alternative on offer, and she shut the door on it herself. That tells us more about her than the 272 does. I think she had settled what kind of power she would accept: her own, or none. Her party had spent the United Front years propping up governments it did not control. At the Working Committee on 25 April, arguing against doing it again, Pranab Mukherjee put the cost in four words: responsibility without any authority. She would not pay it twice. From that call the road ran to an election she might lose, and beyond it to one she might win. Five years on, she won it.

The last call

On 25 April she went back to the President and told him she had tried her best in the further time she had been given but had not been able to make much further progress towards a majority. The Working Committee, she said, would not support a third front government. At her residence that day it resolved unanimously to support no one else.

At 8.40 that evening the President told Vajpayee that the Lok Sabha could not yield a stable government. At noon on 26 April the cabinet recommended dissolution, and the President dissolved the House that day. In his communiqué he observed that those who had voted the government out showed the same lack of cohesion when trying to form an alternative government.

Gujral records two later acts of hers towards him. The first goes back to his warning, and he leaves it undated: later, in passing, she once asked him how he had correctly guessed the course of events. He told her he had spent fifty years in politics with the likes of Surjeet, and certain things you learn only through experience.

The second came after the year had done its worst. By the autumn election Pawar, Sangma and Anwar had raised her foreign origin at her own Working Committee and been expelled. Yet she offered Gujral, whose government her party had brought down less than two years before, a Congress ticket, or her backing for the Rajya Sabha if he did not wish to contest. He calls her gracious enough to make the offer. He declined, having decided that a former prime minister should not switch parties.

It is hard not to see a leader in these two acts. Refused by the parties, she asked the one man who had foretold it how he had known; challenged inside her own party, she tried to bring him in.

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Five years later

Five years later she did it differently, and she began at the house next door. After the state defeats of 2003, Neerja Chowdhury writes, she walked across to see Ram Vilas Paswan, who lived on the other side of the boundary wall of her house.

They had been neighbours before. On the night Rajiv Gandhi was killed in May 1991, Paswan lived two houses from her, and Rasheed Kidwai writes that the Congressmen gathered outside her house turned into a mob, attacked Paswan’s at 12 Janpath and even burned pieces of his furniture, and he had to flee. She sent for R.K. Dhawan and Satish Sharma and told them to make sure nothing untoward happened. Twelve years on, she was the one at his door.

And she called on Sharad Pawar herself, and not the other way around, as had been the practice in the past. Four years earlier he had challenged her over her foreign origin, been expelled and founded a party of his own. I imagine it cost her some pride to go to him. Bismarck called politics the art of the possible, and in 2003 she practised it.

When the votes were counted in May 2004 the allies endorsed her as their candidate for prime minister. And when she went to Rashtrapati Bhavan on 18 May, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam records, she did not come alone. Manmohan Singh came with her. That evening she declined the office.

In 1999 she went with a number and no letters to claim a government for her party, and went back to say she could not.

What she took from those eleven days is not on record. I suspect she learnt what the 1998 campaign had already hinted at: that crowds are not seats, that a number spoken outside Rashtrapati Bhavan is not a majority until it is on paper, and that you go to the allies’ doors rather than waiting for them to come to yours. In 1999 she reached for a government and could not form one. In 2004 she had the office in her hands and gave it away. Belonging will be her own account of both weeks, written by someone who knows how both of them ended.

In May 2004 Sonia Gandhi declined to become prime minister, and Manmohan Singh was sworn in instead. This is that week as the people who heard it recorded it: the President in his memoir, the reporters at his door, and Subramanian Swamy, whose case against her citizenship ran through those days and has outlived them.

At 12.15 in the afternoon of 18 May 2004, by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s account, Sonia Gandhi called on him at Rashtrapati Bhavan. He set the meeting down eight years later in his memoir, Turning Points, and it is the only meeting of that week he dates.

I was told that Sonia Gandhi was meeting me at 12.15 in the afternoon of 18 May. She came in time but instead of coming alone she came with Dr Manmohan Singh and had a discussion with me. She said that she had the requisite numbers but she did not bring the letter of support signed by party functionaries. She would come with the letters of support on the 19th, she said. I asked her why do you postpone. We can even finish it this afternoon. She went away.

Outside, on the forecourt, the reporters heard the same thing from the other side of the door. Neerja Chowdhury was among them; an endnote in her book How Prime Ministers Decide (2023) says Author was part of media present outside Rashtrapati Bhavan that day. She records Sonia Gandhi saying: ‘I will meet the president again tomorrow to complete the negotiations’. Anita Katyal of The Tribune reported the next morning that she told presspersons that after preliminary discussions on government formation, they would be submitting their letters of support tomorrow. The President inside and two reporters outside agree: the papers would come the next day.

By that evening she had declined the office. Between the afternoon call and the swearing-in four days later lies a second meeting, which the President timed to the minute and did not date. And through all of it runs a man who had been questioning her citizenship since at least 2001, in what this series has read.

The case that was waiting

He was not the only challenger, and the courts had already been asked. In April 1999 the Andhra Pradesh High Court held that for registration under Section 5(1)(c) no reciprocity has been imposed by the Parliament. In September 2001 the Supreme Court dismissed appeals in election petitions against her because, as Frontline reported, the petitions made only bald and vague averments; and in the same judgment, as the Delhi High Court quotes it, it stated that by virtue of her certificate, which certificate has not been cancelled, withdrawn or annulled till date, she is “a citizen of India”.

Two of Swamy’s letters from May 2004 are public. On 2 May he asked L.K. Advani, then Deputy Prime Minister at the Home Ministry, to gazette the reciprocal conditions to be imposed, country-wise, on foreigners who become citizens of India under Section 5 of the Citizenship Act. This was relevant, he wrote, for example, to a citizen of Italy who on becoming a citizen of India may try to become the Prime Minister of this nation. On 15 May he wrote to Kalam. He had seen, he said, from the media that she is meeting you on May 17th. He argued a reciprocal disqualification since she is Italian, and asked: Kindly therefore ascertain the legal position from the Home Minister before considering Ms.Gandhi’s claim. The letter asked for a procedure, not an outright refusal.

Before the door

The count settled nothing by itself. The Congress won 145 seats and the BJP 138, and, as Kalam puts it, none of the parties had the strength to form the government on their own. On 15 May, in Pranab Mukherjee’s account, the Congress parliamentary party met in the Central Hall of Parliament and unanimously elected Sonia Gandhi its leader. Kalam recalls waiting: three days had passed and no party or coalition came forward to form the government. It was a cause of concern for me and I asked my secretaries and rushed a letter to the leader of the largest party, the Congress, to come forward and stake the claim for forming the government. That letter is undated in his book, and it has not been produced in anything this series has read.

On Monday 17 May the BJP’s objection was public. For the BJP, Sushma Swaraj said, as PTI reported, that a foreigner would be privy to all the defence secrets. Swamy says he took his case to the President in person that day. The next day he told The Tribune that he had explained the flaw in her citizenship in details in his meeting with him yesterday and again wrote a letter to him today, and the paper’s report opened with his claim that he had urged the President, Mr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, not to administer the oath as the Prime Minister to Ms Sonia Gandhi. Kalam’s book records no meeting with Swamy and does not name him. The meeting is Swamy’s account alone.

On the morning of the 17th Sonia Gandhi telephoned Chowdhury, in response to a request to speak to her, and Chowdhury records the call. As I congratulated her, she began to dwell on the problems the BJP would create for her if she became PM, which could lead to violence in the country. Though her exact words elude me, she said something like, ‘They are going to make my functioning very difficult.’ Chowdhury heard a concern, not a decision. What her family and closest aides heard, and when she decided, is the subject of this series’ ninth episode.

On the 18th, each person who reached the President’s door heard something different.

The eighteenth

The afternoon call opened this piece. Kalam heard that she had the numbers and would bring the letters on the 19th. The reporters heard tomorrow, and nothing of an invitation: Chowdhury records that she did not say anything about having been invited to form the government.

Then the word went out, to colleagues and allies before the MPs. However, by the afternoon, the mood had changed, Katyal wrote. Mrs Gandhi called up her close party colleagues and told them about her decision to decline the post and asked them to convey her decision to the allies. T.R. Ramachandran, in the same paper, has her sending senior leaders to the Left parties and the pre-poll allies within hours of her meeting with Mr Kalam in Rashtrapati Bhawan this afternoon.

Others came to the President that day on one subject. Sushma Swaraj met him, UNI reported, and The President, she said, told her that he would get her views examined. A delegation of the Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan, led by K.N. Govindacharya, drew his attention to the alleged “legal infirmity” in her citizenship, The Tribune reported, and told him that at least two petitions raising the issue had been pending in the Delhi High Court since 1999. Swamy’s letter of 15 May was registered at the President’s Secretariat, on a stamp whose date appears to read 18 May. And to The Tribune Swamy set out the argument he says he had made in person. An Italian citizen, he said, never forfeits his/her citizenship under the Constitution of that country, so the 1983 grant would be termed as “illegal”. This would amount her having “dual” citizenship, which the Indian Constitution does not recognise, Mr Swamy said. The same day, The Tribune‘s legal correspondent reported, the Delhi High Court, on a petition about her foreign origin, declined to intervene in the administering of the oath.

Kalam’s own account of this pressure is general, and he places it between his two meetings with her. While this communication was in progress, I had a number of emails and letters coming from individuals, organizations and parties that I should not allow Mrs Sonia Gandhi to become the prime minister of our country. I had passed on these mails and letters to various agencies in the government for their information without making any remarks. During this time there were many political leaders who came to meet me to request me not to succumb to any pressure and appoint Mrs Gandhi as the prime minister, a request that would not have been constitutionally tenable. Only the last clause of that sentence makes it read as a request to refuse her. Then comes the line on which his account of the week turns: If she had made any claim for herself I would have had no option but to appoint her.

The Tribune‘s main report that night recorded speculation. Mr Swamy sent details to the President about the reciprocity clause in the country’s Citizenship Act which led to speculation that Mr Kalam may have sought a clarification about this matter. It was speculation, by the paper’s own word, and on this series’ reading an earlier and milder form of the later talk that he had kept her from office, which his memoir answers: he passed such letters on without making any remarks, and If she had made any claim for herself I would have had no option but to appoint her.

That evening the Congress MPs heard her decline. She announced her decision at a hurriedly-convened party meeting this evening, Katyal reported, and quoted her: “In this case, my inner voice tells me that I must decline this post.” No transcript of the speech has been read, and the renderings of it differ. The meeting did not choose her successor. Its original resolution, Katyal wrote, had merely authorised Mrs Gandhi to take appropriate steps in the interests of the nation and the Congress party, and the members had it amended, she wrote, to ask her to reconsider. The resolution adopted late tonight, Ramachandran wrote, pleaded with Mrs Gandhi to “reconsider her decision in the best interest of the country and the party.” The curtain was rung down on the CPP without taking up the issue of who would be its leader in place of Mrs Gandhi. Neither of the paper’s reports that night has her at Rashtrapati Bhavan in the evening.

The reasons are recorded differently by those who give them. On 18 May, on his account, Mukherjee went to 10 Janpath, and she told him that she did not want to be the reason for sharp divisions in society because of her elevation to the position of prime minister. K. Natwar Singh, in his memoir of 2014, describes a family scene to which he gives no date: her son, fearing for her life, gave Sonia twenty-four hours to decide, and He had his way. That was the reason for her not becoming Prime Minister. Mani Shankar Aiyar, speaking on television in August 2014, endorsed that Rahul Gandhi had reservations, though, he said, There is more to it than just that.

The President’s memoir seems, at first reading, to put her at Rashtrapati Bhavan that night.

The evening without a date

After the afternoon call, Kalam writes: Later I received a message that she would meet me in the evening, at 8.15 p.m. After his passage on the letters and the leaders, the meeting comes: At the allotted time, 8.15 p.m., Mrs Gandhi came to Rashtrapati Bhavan along with Dr Manmohan Singh. She showed him the letters of support, and he told her: The Rashtrapati Bhavan is ready for the swearing-in ceremony at the time of your choice. That is when, he writes, she told me that she would like to nominate Dr Manmohan Singh. This was definitely a surprise to me and the Rashtrapati Bhavan Secretariat had to rework the letter appointing Dr Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister and inviting him to form the government at the earliest.

He gives the hour. He does not give the day.

There is a case for the 18th. Read on its own, his later and the evening belong to that day. And on one account she had the party’s leave to choose that night: the next day an unnamed senior Congress leader told reporters, as PTI reported, that the party had last night left it to Gandhi to take a decision on Prime Ministership. Ramachandran had written on the 18th that Manmohan Singh is believed to have the backing of Mrs Gandhi to succeed her as the CPP leader.

The reports of the 19th point the other way. That day PTI reported that the two were expected to meet President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam this evening. The Tribune recorded that evening that they called on President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam after the meeting of the CPP here this evening and submitted the documentation of support extended by the allies of the Congress, the Left parties and others; that the President said he was “pleased to appoint Dr Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister”; and that Mr Kalam handed a letter to Dr Singh recognising that he was the leader of the CPP. What Kalam describes at 8.15 p.m. matches that meeting in three particulars: the letters of support shown, a letter handed to Manmohan Singh, and a swearing-in left to their choosing, whose date and timing, the paper’s sources said, would be conveyed to the President tomorrow. What the paper does not report is a nomination made in the room or a President surprised by it. The arrangement made at 12.15 p.m. was for the 19th, and the reports filed on the night of the 18th record no evening call.

On this series’ reading, the 8.15 p.m. meeting was most probably on the evening of 19 May, a day after her refusal was public. That is a reading, not a record. Kalam’s own sentence leans to the 18th, a naming on that night cannot be excluded, and no source gives the day.

The day decides what his surprise means. On my reading, if he heard the name on the 18th, it may have been news to him. If he heard it on the 19th, when Manmohan Singh came as the parliamentary party’s leader, the surprise was more likely at the form, a nomination made to his face, than at the fact.

Retellings have filled the gap from both sides. The Shillong Times, reporting on the book on 1 July 2012, wrote And on May 19 at the allotted time, in its own voice and not Kalam’s. Chowdhury’s How Prime Ministers Decide (2023) quotes Kalam at length but without the words At the allotted time, 8.15 p.m., and sets the passage after the afternoon call she witnessed, so that on her page, on this series’ reading, the nomination reads as part of one meeting on 18 May. Neither changes his words in substance. Each gives readers a day he did not.

For eight years the President’s own account was not public. When it came out, Swamy answered it.

The letter Swamy learnt of

Three things happened in 2012, in this order. In May the President’s Secretariat, answering an application under the Right to Information Act from Subhash Chandra Agrawal, said, as PTI reported, that as per record no political party staked claim to form the Government, and that on objections No records are available in this regard; it withheld Swamy’s letter as confidential. Turning Points was published in June. At the end of the month, in an interview with Firstpost published on 30 June and read here through a repost, Swamy said: I had met (Kalam) at 12.30 pm and explained to him that there is a legal bar. Subsequently, I learnt, he went on, that there was a letter written by him cancelling his appointment with Sonia Gandhi for 5 pm. Of that letter he said: That letter is on record. He had learnt of it; he did not say he had seen it. Kalam’s book records no meeting with her before 12.15 p.m. on the 18th and describes no letter cancelling anything. The letters it describes the President’s side sending are the invitation to the largest party and the appointment letter his Secretariat reworked.

Swamy’s own letter of 15 May supports, at one remove, that a meeting on the 17th was expected, from what he had seen in the media. It does not show that a meeting was fixed for 5 p.m., or that anything was cancelled. And The Tribune of 19 May 2004 did record a communication from Kalam: Mr Kalam’s communication reached Mrs Gandhi in her capacity as Congress president and leader of the CPP, it said, without saying what it contained. On this series’ reading it fits the invitation he describes, addressed to the leader of the largest party, better than the cancellation Swamy described, though no source identifies it.

In December 2012, PTI reported, the Central Information Commission ordered Swamy’s letter disclosed. He was given notice and made no submission, and in January 2013 the Secretariat released it, with his letter to Advani enclosed. What came out of the President’s records, then, was Swamy’s own letter. No letter from Kalam came with it, but on this series’ reading none could have: the request had asked for claims and objections, not for the President’s own letters.

After the week

The case went on, and so did the courts. In April 2005 the Delhi High Court dismissed Swamy’s petition seeking action against her under the Citizenship Act, without ruling on whether her citizenship was valid. Of his statement that Italy still recorded her as a citizen, the court said: This statement is made without disclosing any evidence or source of information. In February 2011 the Allahabad High Court, dismissing an election petition against her, held that her certificate had never been cancelled, withdrawn or annulled till date and that she was “a citizen of India”.

On my reading, the core of his case has hardly moved since 2001: that she remained Italian. What has moved is where he says the proof lies. In 2001 it was his own enquiries, whose source he did not disclose; in 2004, the law and a President told in person; in 2012, a letter in the President’s keeping; in 2015, papers in Rao’s; in 2020, a government file. No court whose judgment has been read has found against her.

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What the week shows

Two meetings, and only one of them dated. Kalam dates the first, at 12.15 p.m. on 18 May, and three accounts of it agree: his own, Chowdhury’s from the forecourt, and Katyal’s in print. The second, at 8.15 p.m., at which, by his account, she named Manmohan Singh, has an hour and no day. On this series’ reading it was most probably 19 May, though his own wording leans to the 18th and no source gives the day.

No one heard it all. On the 17th Chowdhury heard a concern. On the 18th the President heard that the letters would come on the 19th, the reporters heard tomorrow, she sent word to the allies within hours of the call, and Sushma Swaraj, by her account, heard that her views would be examined. The MPs heard of an inner voice, and Mukherjee of sharp divisions in society.

Swamy’s letters are on record; the letter he named has not been produced. His letters of 2 and 15 May 2004 exist and argue law, and the second asks the President to consult the Home Minister; to The Tribune he said he had urged the President not to administer the oath. The letter he said in 2012 he had learnt of, cancelling her appointment, has not been produced in any source this series has read, and Kalam’s book describes no such letter.

On my reading, the decisions were made away from the President’s door. The party’s meetings and her refusal took place elsewhere, and the name of Manmohan Singh came to him as an outcome. He was ready at the time of your choice, and the choice was not his.

A note on sources

Kalam is quoted from Turning Points: A Journey through Challenges (HarperCollins India, 2017 edition, first published in June 2012), chapter 13.

Chowdhury is quoted from How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph, 2023), chapter 6, print pages 438 to 444.

Sushma Swaraj’s words of 17 May are PTI’s, in The Tribune of 18 May 2004, as Chowdhury’s endnote gives them.

Mukherjee is quoted from The Coalition Years (Rupa, 2017), chapter 5.

Natwar Singh from One Life Is Not Enough (Rupa, 2014).

Sitapati from Half Lion (Viking, 2016), chapter 11.

Swamy’s letters of 2 and 15 May 2004 are from the President’s Secretariat’s release of 15 January 2013.

The Tribune‘s reports of 19 and 20 May 2004 by T.R. Ramachandran and Anita Katyal, its report on Swamy and the Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan, and the PTI item of 19 May.

The UNI report on Sushma Swaraj, the High Court report of 18 May, the PTI reports of 2012, The Shillong Times, the Free Press Journal and The Telegraph‘s report of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s remarks were read online.

The Firstpost interview is read through its repost; the original is unread.

Frontline‘s article of 29 September 2001 was read in full, and its article, Citizen Sonia (Volume 16, Issue 12, June 5 to 18, 1999) from an archived copy of the page.

The Delhi High Court judgment of 21 April 2005, which also quotes the Supreme Court’s judgment of 2001, and the Allahabad High Court judgment of 14 February 2011.

The Andhra Pradesh High Court judgment of 23 April 1999.

Sitaram Kesri died on the night of 24 October 2000, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. He had suffered an asthma attack, Rasheed Kidwai writes, and slipped into a coma. The first person to reach the hospital, by Kidwai’s account, was Sonia Gandhi, much before any television channel beamed the news.1

The body was to be flown to Patna for cremation at Danapur, his home town. Before that, the party’s control room at 24 Akbar Road worked through the night so that it was first placed at 24 Akbar Road, where Working Committee members, Congress chief ministers, the Lok Sabha Speaker G.M.C. Balayogi and the BJP president Bangaru Laxman laid wreaths.

Kidwai tells this in a chapter about the control room, as an instance of its efficiency, and draws no conclusion from it. The conclusion is mine. Two and a half years earlier, on 14 March 1998, Kesri had walked out of the same building after a resolution read by Pranab Mukherjee had thanked him for his services and installed Sonia Gandhi in his place. By the time he came out of his office his name board was gone, replaced by a computer printout, and the Special Protection Group was moving in. The building he left as a removed president he re-entered as a body, and the same book records both, in different chapters and to different ends, without connecting them.

Whether anyone in the party connected them that night is not recorded. One man outside it had been keeping the account all along.

The man at the door

Harish Khare enters Kidwai’s story on 28 December 1997, the Congress’s hundred and twelfth birthday. Tom Vadakkan of the party’s media department had run from 10 Janpath with a note: Sonia Gandhi had agreed to campaign. The guard at Kesri’s door would not let him in. Waiting there, with an appointment, was Senior journalist Harish Khare, who was with The Hindu then, and Vadakkan requested the veteran journalist to let him pass on 10 Janpath’s message to Kesri. He wanted to borrow Khare’s turn at the door.

Kidwai does not say what Khare answered. When Vadakkan told the story himself in 2016, the letter went into Khare’s hands and Khare had become his advisor then: Kesri’s.2 No other source found calls him that, and the earlier account is the more careful one. What neither version disputes is that Khare was close enough to Kesri to be waiting at his door that afternoon.

Three columns

Over the next three years Khare wrote about Kesri three times in passages Kidwai preserves, and each is a verdict rather than a report.

On the removal: The constitutional coup was hailed widely as restoring the party’s leadership back to the site of its only natural entitlement – the Nehru-Gandhi family. History, he wrote, would show most of the honourable men of the Congress to have acted way less than honourably; even those who owned their rehabilitation and place in the CWC to the old man had no qualms in abandoning him. Kidwai sets this beside the cheering of 14 March, but the column’s own tenses look back: was hailed, that eventful day, the consequences are visible. It reads as written years later, and Kidwai gives it no date.

On the evening in May 1999 when Kesri, a special invitee to the Working Committee that was expelling Sharad Pawar, P.A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar, was roughed up at the headquarters and went home to change his torn kurta: Someone had decided that Kesri – as also others – was among the ‘suspects’ lacking in hundred per cent loyalty to the leadership. Someone names nobody, and planned, Khare’s word for the roughing up, is his judgement. This column too was written after the fact, since it ends with the electorate having had its say soon in the general elections.

In the months that remained to him, Kidwai writes, Kesri would often say that the Congress leadership was like the blazing sun: Bahut paas jaoge to jal jaoge aur bahut door rahoge to thand se mar jaoge. Get too close and you burn; stay too far and you freeze. Kidwai gives no occasion and no listener. He adds that when Varun Gandhi came looking for the Congress of his father’s time, the only leader of standing who received him warmly was Kesri, and that Kesri died before the visits to Purana Qila Road could become regular.

The obituary

Then the third column. In Kesri’s death, Khare wrote in The Hindu, the Congress lost its most unapologetic advocate of the Mandal politics. And: His death weakens the Congress’s collective instinct for maintaining and strengthening bridges with the “backward” constituency.

One more thing, and it is my reading. At the Kolkata plenary in August 1997, Sonia Gandhi had read from a prepared text about the party’s need, in Kidwai’s paraphrase, to rebuild bridges with the scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes and the other backward castes, glancing, Kidwai has it, at a stoic Kesri.Three years later Khare used the same image for the man she replaced. In one account the bridges were something the new leader would build. In the other they were something the old one had been keeping up.

In May 1999 Sonia Gandhi resigned the Congress presidency over colleagues who, in her letter as Rasheed Kidwai reproduces it, thought her having been born elsewhere a liability. Five years later, by Neerja Chowdhury’s account, that objection was the reason she gave for declining to be prime minister.

At a meeting of the Congress Working Committee that Rasheed Kidwai dates to 15 May 1999, P. A. Sangma, as those present later recounted it, built a case that the BJP’s campaign against her foreign origin was seeping down to even remote villages, and then told her: ‘We know very little about you, about your parents.’ 1 Sharad Pawar spoke next. Soon afterwards she resigned the presidency of the party, in writing.

Paper first

To see why she answered as she did in 2004, it helps to go back to how she ran things before anyone offered her the office. Every decision is shaped long before it is made. What she would decide depended on what she got to hear, who told her, and whether it came as a written note or a word in the ear. By May 2004 she had spent six years building her own way of handling all three, and the place to start is a small habit.

She preferred to run the party on paper. Kidwai’s description of her at 24 Akbar Road is of a president who preferred the written word to the spoken, and who insisted on concept notes and written briefs, a habit he is careful to trace to her husband’s years. A leader who wants things in writing is easier to reach for those who write, and harder for those used to talking their way in. In a party organised around personal audience, that single procedural preference redistributes influence.2

The same preference shows in her speeches, and the witness here is K. Natwar Singh, who was in the room. After she took over the party in March 1998, by his account, each speech was an exercise that would take six to eight hours, sometimes running till midnight. She read the text aloud and he timed it; it was then translated into Hindi, and the Hindi transliterated into English letters and printed in bold. When he suggested she learn a couplet or two of Tulsidas or Kabir to use in her speeches, she declined: ‘I go blank even with a written text. You want me to say something extempore? Forget it.’ 3 What the preparation produced, Neerja Chowdhury saw on a campaign flight to Bellary in 1999. The transliterated speech lay on the foldout table in front of her, and when Chowdhury and a couple of other journalists went up to speak to her, this time our questions did not ruffle her. This time is the point. At a tea party Najma Heptulla gave for her and the press in 1998, Chowdhury had stood right behind her and could actually see her hand shaking as she held the cup. Quite a transformation, and preparation had made it.4

Whose words went into the text was settled in the same room. Senior Congressmen sent suggestions and drafts, and seldom were these used; Jairam Ramesh became a regular at the sessions, alongside Natwar Singh himself. 5

The paper stopped at a boundary. Once there was a government to deal with, from May 2004, Baru writes, it was not her normal practice to write formal letters to the prime minister; she almost always conveyed serious concerns orally, directly or through intermediaries such as Ahmed Patel and Pulok Chatterjee.6 Written instructions inside the party, conversation across the line into government: I read that as one practice with an edge to it, though neither Kidwai nor Baru says so.

What the paper produced comes next.

The declaration at Pachmarhi

In September 1998, months into the job, she took the party to the hill resort of Pachmarhi for three days. Pranab Mukherjee recalls some three hundred delegates divided into five groups, and her sitting in on each of them for about an hour.7 When the groups reported, she asked him, on the advice of the organiser, Nawal Kishore Sharma, to turn their conclusions into a declaration.

Its line on allies is the sentence much of what followed turns on. The party, it said, would consider coalitions only when absolutely necessary, and only on agreed programmes that would not weaken it or compromise its ideology. 8 Mukherjee himself later remembered it more loosely, as coalitions where absolutely necessary. The document is firmer than his memory of it.

What Pachmarhi changed is easier to see in the room than on the page. The coalition line lasted under five years. On secularism the declaration claimed nothing new: it re-dedicated the party to its ideological sentinels, among them secularism as defined in the past. But Mukherjee, who had found the clause that made her president and drafted the resolution that did it, says plainly that he was not in her inner circle in her initial years. It was the conclave, by his account, that brought him close; afterwards she started consulting me more frequently.9 A drafting job opened a door, on my reading.

He also offers a gloss on her closing words there. She had said that coalitions reflected in many ways the party’s decline, that this was a passing phase, and that in the interim, coalitions may well be needed. Mukherjee writes that she anticipated what was to happen in 2004. That is hindsight. Nothing about 2004 was settled in 1998, and the remark itself treats coalitions as temporary. When the line was finally abandoned at Shimla in 2003, Mukherjee remembers himself as the lone voice against the change; Fotedar, who was also there, has him helping to draft the coalition strategy and, with Arjun Singh, giving the resolution its final touches. 10 Both cannot be right.

The chief ministers

Pachmarhi was followed, Kidwai writes, by annual conclaves of the party’s chief ministers, in Delhi, Guwahati, Mount Abu and Nainital, a practice he counts among the ways she differed from her predecessors. He is clear about their purpose, though he attributes it to nobody: not to monitor the states, but to teach her the finer points of governance and prepare her for larger work.

Only one is dated. At Mount Abu, on 10 and 11 November 2002, she supervised discussions on drinking water, power, health, the empowerment of Dalits and women and the Kyoto Treaty, and heard a former director of the Intelligence Bureau, M.K. Narayanan, argue for a change of mindset on insurgency in the Northeast and Kashmir. Read for access rather than character, it is a list of who was briefing her before anyone offered her a government.

The committee and the house

At the start, Mukherjee recalls, she changed almost nothing. She left the elected members of the Working Committee in place, kept every office-bearer, and made changes only among the nominated members; Sangma was one of her additions. Pawar was the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha. Manmohan Singh led it in the Rajya Sabha from March 1998, appointed by her, Kidwai writes.

The Working Committee met often at first, by Kidwai’s account dozens of times a year, and at the party office: the resolution on secularism in January 1999 was adopted at 24 Akbar Road. Then it met less. Kidwai dates the decline three different ways in two pages, from 2000 to after October 2003, so no single year can be printed. An aide blamed the size of a body that had grown unwieldy and ungainly, and it had grown partly because she filled it with special and permanent invitees, the chief ministers among them. Next, Kidwai writes, she began summoning a few leaders, Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil, Ahmed Patel and Mukherjee among them, before any important decision. At some point, undated, even meetings of the committee have been known to be held more at her residence than at the party office. The hedge is Kidwai’s.

The traditionalists were dismayed, he adds; even in the years of the Nehru, Gandhi and Bose quarrels, one old-timer said, the committee had met regularly. But a regular committee at the party office was already a memory when she arrived. Under Rajiv Gandhi the general secretaries had gathered at his house and late-night talks had replaced the committee; under Narasimha Rao most meetings were held at the prime minister’s residence; Sitaram Kesri held his serious discussions in a room next to his bedroom. Moving the party’s business into the leader’s house was the Congress’s habit long before it was hers. If Kidwai’s hedged sentence holds, she was the fourth president in a row to do it, and the only one whose move he cannot date. That reading is mine.

In January 1999 the committee was still meeting at the party office, and the question in front of it was not her birth. It was Hinduism’s place in the party’s secularism.

The most effective guarantor

The demolition of the Babri Masjid had left the Congress accused by Muslim leaders of a narrow majoritarianism, while a group inside the party wanted the meaning of secularism reviewed. Kidwai reports her view, without a source, that after the demolition the party was seen to have compromised on secularism. Her answer came at the Ramakrishna Mission on 12 January 1999, Vivekananda's anniversary. India, she said, was secular primarily because Hinduism ‘has been based on what our ancients said: Truth is one’, and she accused those who had appropriated Vivekananda of seeking to distort the very message of Hinduism.11

He also sets the speech beside V.N. Gadgil, the party’s spokesman under Rao and Kesri, telling a training camp at Kurla that the Congress treated only Muslims as a minority. Gadgil explained himself in arithmetic: Muslims were eighteen per cent of the vote, and ‘Even if all of them vote for the Congress, the party will not return to power.’ The same report has him attacking the appeasement of Muslims, so the arithmetic came with a grievance attached. Kidwai tells this before the speech, and it reads as the provocation she was answering. But the report he cites is from September 2000, more than eighteen months after the resolution, and Gadgil’s own complaint about thirty-six Sikhs killed in Kashmir recently fits the Chittisinghpura killings of March 2000, a matching that is mine. He said ‘I have said this earlier’, and nobody records when. What is in print came after.

Four months after the resolution, the question in that committee was no longer the party’s creed. It was her birth. First, though, a government fell.

Two hundred and seventy-two

On 14 April 1999 Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK withdrew its support from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and on 17 April his government lost a confidence vote by one. That night, Mukherjee writes, the Working Committee authorised her to take all further action, and she put three men on the budget so that a fallen government would not become a financial crisis: Pawar, Manmohan Singh and Mukherjee. Kidwai adds, without a source, that Pawar was given the job of collecting the allies’ signatures on a letter that made her the candidate for prime minister.

She went to President K.R. Narayanan, Natwar Singh writes, at the urging of Arjun Singh and others, claimed 272 members and was given two days. We have 272 (MPs), and we hope to get more, she told reporters, in Baru’s wording; Chowdhury, reporting from the forecourt, gives the second clause differently. The number did not hold. The Samajwadi Party stayed out, and at least five explanations of why survive, none better than the others. On 25 April, Mukherjee writes, she told the committee, meeting at her residence, that she had informed the President she did not have the numbers.

The man who had been collecting signatures for her was about to turn on her.

The leader in the Lok Sabha

Pawar led her party in the lower house, and Kidwai has him telling unnamed confidants that February that the Congress now revolved around Arjun Singh’s house. Why he did what he did next has four explanations and no confession. Mukherjee thinks he expected to be asked to stake a claim himself, felt sidelined when she consulted P. Shiv Shankar instead, and that this may have been responsible. Kidwai describes a bet on a hung parliament, in which regional leaders would not back her for the top job while she led the party, and he was confident of running a coalition, with associates who were said to be Chandra Shekhar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and George Fernandes. Chowdhury sees ambition, and Kumar Ketkar told her he decided when she claimed the majority. None of the four is Pawar.12

Born elsewhere

The three, Pawar, Sangma and Tariq Anwar, had put their case in writing as a principle, Mukherjee records: no person of foreign origin should be president, vice president or prime minister of India. Sangma, Mukherjee notes, had been nominated to the committee by her.

She called some of them in, Mukherjee writes, and told them she would resign. At the next meeting, by the CNN report he reproduces, she said she felt she should recuse herself, that I have penned down a statement, and left a copy with him. Then she left. Her letter, as Kidwai reproduces it, names the objection exactly: some colleagues thought my having been born elsewhere is a liability to the Congress party; and, Though born in a foreign land, I chose India as my country. I am Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. Kidwai writes, without a source, that Priyanka drafted it, which sits awkwardly beside her own words in the room.13

The committee rejected the resignation and expelled the three; The Tribune reported it on 22 May. Then the gates of 10 Janpath opened. The chief ministers came first, and Digvijaya Singh said they would all resign; thousands of party workers followed, some of them, Kidwai concedes, mobilised. A few days later she withdrew the resignation. To Pawar the whole show seems to have been stage-managed. Her own line on the premiership was that the parliamentary party would decide it.

In May 1999 the objection that would be raised against her again five years later was put to her by members of her own Working Committee, and she answered it with a resignation over her own signature that described it. That the first occasion shaped the second is a line I am drawing; no source draws it. In 1999 nothing about 2004 was settled, including whether anyone would ever offer her the office.

Heads and hearts

She came back with a condition. Those who wanted to walk with her, she told the party at Talkatora, as Kidwai reports it, should do so with their heads and their hearts, and anyone with an iota of uncertainty was free to go.

What followed is the evidence that she took the party, and it is evidence of acts. Three members of her committee had been expelled. After the revolt, Kidwai writes, she filled the party office with office-bearers, sometimes as many as a hundred and twenty-five; he gives no year. At some point in her tenure the committee filled with invitees, consultation moved to the few she summoned, and the meetings thinned. In 1998 she kept the elected committee and every office-bearer. After the revolt she staffed the party office herself. Kidwai’s word for where this had got to by 2000 is grip, iron in one passage and better in another.

Her choice in 1999?

Was Manmohan Singh already her choice? The case for begins with his place. He had led her party in the Rajya Sabha since March 1998, so he was already her leader there when she went to the President in April 1999. Kidwai records him as chairman of the party’s strategy committee, ahead of Mukherjee and Arjun Singh, though not when or by whom; Baru calls him a second in command in all but name and the man by her side when she met foreign leaders between 1999 and 2004. That is proximity, not a stated preference. Kidwai’s remark that Congressmen could now understand why she kept him close is written from after 2004, and the now gives it away.

The direct claim has one witness. M.L. Fotedar wrote to her in 2006 that in April 1999 she had told him she did not want the office and wanted Manmohan Singh, and that he was stunned; by his book of 2015 the story included a letter to the President that named Singh and his own advice to strike the name out. One man, three tellings, the later ones with more of himself in them, on my reading. His standing that April makes the account plausible; it does not confirm it. No other account from the time records it, and in public she claimed the office for herself, as Baru puts it, under her own leadership. A Tribune columnist did forecast Singh’s name the day before the vote, which is a columnist’s forecast, not a report of her wish, and Baru proposed it a month later, to friends who scoffed. When Singh lost South Delhi that autumn, Fotedar blamed two party colleagues without naming an act, and Baru wrote that perhaps some Congressmen suspected she was grooming him. The Congress lost all seven Delhi seats, and suspicion of a plan is not evidence of one.

The fairest sentence the record allows is this: no account from the time records that she wanted him in 1999; one participant said so later, three different ways; and everything she claimed in public was for herself. Both can be true. What they amount to belongs to the relationship that ran the country for the next ten years.14

In May 2004 the question was put again, and this time there was an office to answer it with.

Four days in May

The Congress won 145 seats to the BJP’s 138, and Mukherjee, counting his own votes in Jangipur on 13 May, took a call from her and Patel, joyous and amazed. Some of the work predated the count: by Chowdhury’s account Patel had asked V.P. Singh on 7 May to help make Sonia prime minister, and on 14 May gave the interview that Rediff headlined The Case for Sonia Gandhi. That week, Chowdhury records, she put Manmohan Singh at the head of the group drafting the programme the Left wanted, and Baru published an editorial advising her to make him prime minister. In the week itself these were a job and an opinion.15

On 15 May the parliamentary party elected her its leader, and on 16 May the alliance’s leaders came to dinner at 10 Janpath and endorsed her. Somewhere in those days, Chowdhury was told by K. Subrahmanyam, who was not on the call, Vajpayee telephoned and warned her not to take the prize.

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The morning and the room

Monday began badly. The Sensex fell at one point by more than fifteen per cent and trading was halted twice; investors, the Associated Press reported, had panicked over how the communist parties would influence the new government’s policy. Sushma Swaraj, for the BJP, was saying a foreigner would be privy to the defence secrets.16 That morning, Chowdhury writes, Sonia Gandhi told Patel and Ambika Soni separately that she would not take the office, and gave Patel her reason: she did not want the new government weakened by the fierce opposition to her foreign origins. She drew up a statement with Patel, and Ambika Soni told her to do it in a way remembered by posterity. Chowdhury’s notes source Ambika Soni’s words to Ambika Soni and the rest of the morning to nobody. One part needs no source: Chowdhury was herself on the call with which this piece opened. She hung up having heard a concern, not a decision.17

The room belongs to K. Natwar Singh, and the version to cite is his book of 2014. Rahul Gandhi, afraid his mother would be killed as his father and grandmother had been, gave her twenty-four hours to decide, with Manmohan Singh, Priyanka, Suman Dubey and Natwar Singh present. He had his way, Natwar Singh writes, and that was the reason she did not become prime minister. He gives no date and no hour. The sofa, the silence and the hour were added when he talked to Chowdhury in 2018, and the hour comes with its own hedge: It must have been around 2 p.m. Mani Shankar Aiyar said on television in 2014 that Rahul Gandhi had reservations, so the central fact is not Natwar Singh’s alone.18

My reading, labelled as one: if the scene took place on the afternoon of 17 May, the decision had already been taken and told to two aides that morning, and the ultimatum cannot have made it. If the room made the decision, it came earlier, and only a recollection given fourteen years later, beginning It must have been, puts it on the 17th. Against that, the morning has no source in Chowdhury’s notes, and the ultimatum is in Natwar Singh’s own book, under his name, written while she still led his former party.

Then she told the senior leaders, in Natwar Singh’s telling, that she had asked Manmohan Singh to be prime minister, and Singh replied that he did not have the mandate. The leaders resented being kept in the dark. Mukherjee, whom Natwar Singh places there with a caveat about his own memory, describes no such meeting and has himself hearing the news from Patel after the speech of the 18th.

Inner voice

She called on President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who wrote that at a meeting he puts at 8.15 p.m. and does not date, he had the swearing-in ready for her and her nomination of Manmohan Singh was definitely a surprise to me.19 On 18 May, in the evening by Chowdhury’s account, she declined the office in the Central Hall of Parliament. The three books that print the speech are best read as cuts from a single text. Two of them carry the sentence people remember, Today, that voice tells me I must humbly decline this post; the newspaper version the third relies on has it shorter, I humbly decline the post. None has her mention her children, the BJP or where she was born. To Mukherjee, who went to 10 Janpath to change her mind, she gave another reason: she did not want to be the cause of sharp divisions in society.20

The first days

On 19 May she, Manmohan Singh and Natwar Singh discussed who would serve in the prime minister’s office; Baru has her trying first for a retired official of her choosing and then placing her aide Pulok Chatterjee there. Mukherjee worked out the formula for sharing portfolios in the presence of her, Manmohan Singh, Natwar Singh and Patel; the Congress kept Defence, Home, External Affairs and Finance, and when Lalu Prasad Yadav wanted Home, she offered his party Rural Development instead. On 22 May the Manmohan Singh government was sworn in.

Takeaways

The party became hers by acts, not adjectives. She kept what she inherited in 1998 and filled the party office only after the revolt of 1999. The committee thinned and the consultation moved to a few, but that migration, as I read it, was the Congress’s habit before it was hers.

Pachmarhi’s lasting change, on my reading, was a person. Its coalition line was gone within five years. The man who compiled it entered her circle.

The Gadgil story may run the other way from how it is told. The speech and the resolution came first in print; his argument appears only afterwards, though he said he had made it before.

Pawar’s motive has four readers and no witness. What he did is on the record. Why is not.

Manmohan Singh in 1999 rests on one man. Fotedar’s claim may be true, and nothing from the time supports it.

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The test is the book. Does Belonging say whom she wanted in 1999, when she decided in 2004, and why?

Chowdhury’s morning gives the opposition to her foreign origins, Mukherjee heard divisions in society, Natwar Singh says her son, and the speech says none of these.

A memoir that gives one of the four is choosing. And if the Central Hall speech appears as written in a single sitting from conviction, somebody has decided that Ambika Soni’s word, posterity, is not part of the story.

A note on readings. Three conclusions in this piece are mine, not any source’s: that her preference for paper redistributed influence in the party; that the change between Najma Heptulla’s tea party and the Bellary flight was the work of preparation; and that whose words went into her speeches was settled in that small room, and was her choice. Natwar Singh does not say why the drafts senior Congressmen sent were seldom used, and for the government years after 2004 Sanjaya Baru writes that her speeches were mostly written by Congress party politicians or her close associates.

Next week: the ten years after the swearing-in.

This series keeps a graded claim ledger behind it. Every correction to a published piece is listed and dated on the corrections page, including the ones that run in my favour.

Alongside the eleven-part series, I am publishing this additional piece on Sonia Gandhi and secularism. It examines the Congress Working Committee’s resolution, the references to Hinduism as the effective guarantor of secularism, and the conflicting accounts surrounding it. This piece is intended as a further companion to the 11 part series on the upcoming book ‘Belonging’ to be released on 10 ^th November 2026.

On Tuesday 12 January 1999, Sonia Gandhi gave a speech about Hinduism. Four days later, her party wrote it into a resolution. The story usually told about those four days begins with a man who, on the evidence in print, spoke after both of them. It usually leaves out the year of attacks on Christians that came before them.

She had been Congress president for ten months. This is what the record holds about how she answered a question she inherited, in the week she answered it, and about the order in which the story is usually told.

A year of attacks

By then a second question had arrived, and this one was about Christians.

Sanjay Ruparelia, in Divided We Govern, describes the first year of the BJP-led government in New Delhi. Campaigns “orchestrated by the sangh parivar against Christians in the tribal belts of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat”, he writes, ended in the desecration of churches and in murders of priests and nuns. The VHP defended them as “expressions of the anger of patriotic Hindu youth against anti-national forces”. Ruparelia gives the climate, not the dates.

The dates come from elsewhere. Human Rights Watch, in its 1999 report on attacks against Christians in India, records the murder of Luke Putaniyil of the Missionaries of Charity at Nawada, near Patna, in Bihar, on 25 March 1998.

On the night of 22 to 23 September 1998, four nuns were gang-raped at Jhabua, in Madhya Pradesh. The Tribune reported it from New Delhi on 29 September, as L.K. Advani promised an inquiry. Human Rights Watch records the same attack.

Then came Christmas. The Tribune of 30 December 1998 reported attacks over “the last few days” on churches and Christian institutions in Ahwa and the villages around it, in Gujarat’s Dangs district, and on a chapel in Surat district. The Union Home Ministry sent a team. The Congress spokesperson, Girija Vyas, said the Sangh Parivar was “trying to cast off its mask”.

Two weeks later, the Congress president spoke about Hinduism.

The speech

Kidwai places it at the Ramakrishna Mission, on Vivekananda’s anniversary. India, she said, was secular primarily because Hinduism “has been based on what our ancients said: Truth is one”.

She then turned on her opponents. It was tragic, she said, that Vivekananda “has been over the years sought to be appropriated by certain sections of our society”, people who spread the politics of hate and who “seek to distort the very message of Hinduism”.

Kidwai gives the occasion but not the date. The date comes from a newspaper, and so does the rest of that week.

On the same day, by The Tribune‘s account, the German Ambassador, H. Dieckmann, told a national daily that the attacks on Christians and chapels in Gujarat were “an internal affair with international implication”. He said he would raise the matter with the Indian government.

The BJP’s answer

On 13 January the BJP replied, and The Tribune printed the reply the next morning under the headline “Remarks of German envoy irk BJP”.

The party’s vice-president, J.P. Mathur, called the ambassador’s remarks “an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of India”. He accused the Congress, in the paper’s words, of “trying to play vote-bank politics with the Christians”. He rejected the Congress’s demand that the question of conversions be referred to the Supreme Court. “Conversions never were a free for all affair,” he said.

Then, in the same report, he turned to her speech. It was “nice to hear Mrs Sonia Gandhi admit that India is essentially secular because of Hinduism”, he said, and he hoped she would come to “actually believe in what she said on Tuesday”.

12 January 1999 was a Tuesday. And on 13 January, the BJP read her speech as part of an argument about Christians.

Why she spoke

So the sequence is on the record: attacks on Christians through 1998, the Dangs at Christmas, the speech on 12 January, the ambassador the same day, the BJP’s answer on the 13th, the resolution on the 16th.

The reason is not. What follows is my reading, and only that. A Congress president whose Christian background her opponents were already raising, speaking two weeks after churches were attacked in Gujarat, chose to defend secularism in the language of Hinduism and Vivekananda, not in the language of minority rights. On my reading, the attacks are part of what she was answering, and speaking through Hinduism was a way to answer them that her opponents could not easily turn against her birth.

The case against that reading is strong, and it belongs in the same paragraph. The speech, as far as Kidwai quotes it, names no Christians, no conversions and no Gujarat. Kidwai ties it to the Babri Masjid and to Gadgil. Ruparelia does not mention it. The only source from that week that joins the speech to the attacks is the BJP’s vice-president, her opponent, and his was a charge of vote-bank politics, not evidence of her motive. Her other opponents, by Kidwai’s account, saw a different motive altogether: her own background.

The man at Kurla

Kidwai tells the story in another order. In his telling, the speech has a provocation, and its name is V.N. Gadgil.

Gadgil had been the party’s spokesman under Rao and Sitaram Kesri. Ruparelia, citing the Hindustan Times of 20 January 1997, calls him the Congress’s spokesperson in the Kesri months too. At a seven-day training camp in Maharashtra, at Kurla, meant to select “future Congress leaders”, Gadgil attacked the leadership. Every time the Shahi Imam made a statement, he complained, the party reacted as if God himself had spoken. Did minorities mean only Muslims? When 36 Sikhs were killed in Kashmir recently, he said, not one Congressman had condoled.

Asked why he was saying all this, he gave a number. Muslims were 18 per cent of the vote. “Even if all of them vote for the Congress, the party will not return to power.” He called it sheer electoral arithmetic, and said he was born a Congressman and would die one.

Then Kidwai turns to her. “Sonia remained unfazed by Gadgil’s outburst,” he writes, and moves to the speech. Afterwards, he adds, Gadgil was pleased.

Read in that order, the speech is a reply. A senior party man says the Congress has forgotten Hindus. The president says India is secular because of Hinduism. The spokesman is satisfied.

The citation at the end of the paragraph

Kidwai’s own source for Kurla sits at the foot of the Gadgil passage: The Asian Age, 4 September 2000.

That is nearly 20 months after the speech, and more than 19 months after the resolution. On the evidence of Kidwai’s citation, the outburst he places before the speech was reported long after it.

Gadgil’s own words point the same way. On 20 March 2000, Sikh villagers were killed at Chittisinghpura, in Anantnag district. The Tribune reported 35 dead. Gadgil’s 36 Sikhs killed “recently” fits that massacre, six months before The Asian Age report. If the match holds, the Kurla remarks cannot date from before January 1999. That match is my reading, not Kidwai’s or Gadgil’s: “recently” is elastic, and the counts differ by one.

There is one thing in Gadgil’s favour. “I have said this earlier,” he told the camp. He may well have argued the same thing before 1999. Nobody records where, or when.

So the honest statement is narrow. What is in print came after the speech. Whatever Gadgil said earlier, nobody has put it on the record.

Hinduism, or Hindus?

There is a smaller puzzle inside the larger one, and it sits on two facing pages of the same book.

Kidwai’s paraphrase of the speech says India was secular primarily because of Hinduism. The resolution he quotes four days later gives her words differently: India is secular “primarily because of Hindus, both as a philosophy and as a way of life”, followed by the Sanskrit Ekam satyam, vipraha bahudha vadanti, the truth is one, the wise pursue it variously.

One sentence is about a faith. The other is about its followers. Mathur, in The Tribune, heard Hinduism.

During this period, the CWC met at 24 Akbar Road and adopted a resolution on 16 January 1999, articulating the Congress’s definition of secularism. It said, ‘The CWC endorses the views of the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, in her speech on the anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, where she had said, “India is secular primarily because of Hindus, both as a philosophy and as a way of life based on what our ancients said, Ekam satyam, vipraha bahudha vadanti (The truth is one, the wise pursue it variously).”

Kidwai, Rasheed. 24 Akbar Road [Revised and Updated]: A Short History of the People behind the Fall and Rise of the Congress (p. 250). Kindle Edition.

The word “Hindus” in Kidwai’s quoted resolution appears to be an editorial typo or transcription error in his book ‘24 Akbar Road,’ as the resolution directly referenced the philosophy of Hinduism rather than demography.

The story told again

Twenty years after the speech, Kidwai told the Kurla story once more, in a 2019 article for the Observer Research Foundation about the Congress after its defeat that year. The Gadgil passage is close to the book’s wording. This time it carries no date and no newspaper. The speech is not in it, and Gadgil is set against Rahul Gandhi’s Congress instead.

Without the speech beside it, Gadgil’s warning reads, on my reading, as what the dates suggest it was: an argument made inside a party that had already said, in public, what he wanted it to say. Kidwai’s own verdict in the book points the same way. The focus on Hinduism, he writes, “may have pleased Gadgil and a few others, but the ideological issue was far from settled.”

This series told the story in Kidwai’s order too, in its first episode. The correction runs against our own published account, and it stands.

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Again, in this episode of Netanagari, Rasheed Kidwai speaks the same thing about the 1999 CWC resolution. Listen at around the 51-minute mark.

Even here, Rasheed says that the resolution passed in January 1991 declared Hinduism to be the sole guarantor of secularism, which again was wrong, “as the the resolution acknowledged Hinduism as the most effective guarantor of secularism in India.” Too many errors surrounding a single CWC resolution make me wonder whether they were deliberate on Rasheed’s part.

What the order decides

The sequence is a small thing to argue about. It decides a large thing.

Told with Gadgil first, the speech of 12 January 1999 is a concession: a new president giving ground to a spokesman who had counted the votes. Told in the order the dates allow, it comes after a year of attacks on Christians and two weeks after the Dangs, on the day a foreign ambassador spoke about them, and the BJP answered it the next morning in the same breath as conversions. Gadgil, in print, arrives nearly 20 months later and, Kidwai says, approves.

Which one it was, only she can say. Belonging is published on 10 November.

Change the order of two events, and you change which one was the cause.

Sources: Rasheed Kidwai, 24 Akbar Road (revised edition) ;

Sanjay Ruparelia, Divided We Govern, ch. 12, “The Dissolution of the Third Force (1998–2012)”, print p290, and ch. 10 for Gadgil in January 1997;

The Tribune, 30 September 1998, 30 December 1998, 14 January 1999 and 25 March 2000; Human Rights Watch, 1999 report on attacks against Christians in India, section V, “Attacks across the country”;

The Pachmarhi Declaration, as reproduced in Pranab Mukherjee, The Coalition Years; Rasheed Kidwai, Observer Research Foundation, 3 June 2019. The Asian Age report of 4 September 2000 is cited as Kidwai cites it;

यह दस्तावेज़ मार्च 1998 से मई 2004 के बीच भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस पार्टी में सोनिया गांधी के नेतृत्व का विश्लेषण करता है। इसमें उनके काम करने के तरीकों, पार्टी को मजबूत करने के प्रयासों और मई 2004 में उनके प्रधानमंत्री न बनने के फैसले से जुड़ी घटनाओं पर ध्यान केंद्रित किया गया है।

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मुख्य बिंदु

* दस्तावेज़ों के ज़रिए कामकाज: सोनिया गांधी ने लिखित नोट, कॉन्सेप्ट ब्रीफ और बारीकी से तैयार किए गए दस्तावेज़ों पर ज़ोर देकर कांग्रेस पार्टी के कामकाज के तरीके को पूरी तरह बदल दिया। इस बदलाव ने पार्टी के भीतर शक्ति संतुलन को बदल दिया; अब वे लोग ज़्यादा प्रभावशाली हो गए जो लिखित दस्तावेज़ों के ज़रिए अपनी बात रखते थे, जबकि पारंपरिक रूप से मौखिक रूप से प्रभाव डालने वालों की अहमियत कम हो गई।

* पार्टी पर पकड़ मज़बूत करना: मई 1999 में उनके विदेशी मूल को लेकर पार्टी के भीतर हुए बड़े विद्रोह के बाद, सोनिया गांधी ने पुराने संगठनात्मक ढांचे को हटाकर अपने वफादार लोगों को नियुक्त किया। उन्होंने निर्णय लेने की प्रक्रिया को कुछ चुनिंदा सलाहकारों तक सीमित कर दिया और पार्टी के कामकाज का मुख्य केंद्र ‘24 अकबर रोड’ से बदलकर अपने आवास ‘10 जनपथ’ पर स्थानांतरित कर दिया।

* गठबंधन को लेकर रणनीतिक बदलाव: 1998 के ‘पचमढ़ी घोषणापत्र’ में यह तय किया गया था कि गठबंधन तभी किया जाएगा जब यह “अत्यंत आवश्यक” हो। यह नीति जुलाई 2003 (शिमला अधिवेशन) तक लागू रही, जिसके बाद पार्टी ने भाजपा के नेतृत्व वाली सरकार को सत्ता से हटाने के लिए धर्मनिरपेक्ष ताकतों के एक बड़े गठबंधन का नेतृत्व करने का औपचारिक निर्णय लिया।

* 2004 के फैसले को लेकर अलग-अलग दृष्टिकोण: 17-18 मई 2004 को सोनिया गांधी द्वारा प्रधानमंत्री पद ठुकराने के कारणों को लेकर चार अलग-अलग व्याख्याएं दी जाती हैं:

1. विदेशी मूल का विरोध: भारत के बाहर जन्म लेने के कारण सरकार चलाने में आने वाली संभावित बाधाओं और कड़े राजनीतिक विरोध का डर (नीर्जा चौधरी ने अहमद पटेल के हवाले से यह जानकारी दी है)।

2. सामाजिक सद्भाव: भारतीय समाज में गहरे विभाजन या ध्रुवीकरण को रोकने की इच्छा (प्रणब मुखर्जी ने इसका ज़िक्र किया है)।

3. पारिवारिक चिंता: उनके बेटे राहुल गांधी की ओर से मिली चेतावनी; अपने पिता और दादी की हत्या के बाद, राहुल को अपनी माँ की सुरक्षा को लेकर गहरी चिंता थी (के. नटवर सिंह ने इस बात का ज़िक्र किया है)।

4. व्यक्तिगत दृढ़ विश्वास: एक आंतरिक नैतिक अनिवार्यता, जिसे उन्होंने 18 मई के अपने भाषण में “अंतरात्मा की आवाज़” के रूप में व्यक्त किया था।

समय-क्रम में विसंगतियां: टाइमलाइन से कुछ महत्वपूर्ण विश्लेषणात्मक विसंगतियां सामने आती हैं—खास तौर पर, ऐसे विवरण जिनसे पता चलता है कि उन्होंने 17 मई, 2004 की सुबह ही अपने सहयोगियों को अपना इनकार बता दिया था, वे उस दोपहर की बैठक से पहले के हैं, जिसमें कथित तौर पर राहुल गांधी ने अपना अल्टीमेटम दिया था।

और क्या हुआ, यह सब जानने के लिए पॉडकास्ट सुनें।

Last week began at a wicket gate. Rasheed Kidwai records that when the Congress moved into 24 Akbar Road in 1978, the house came with one advantage: a gate linking it to 10 Janpath.

On 28 December 1997, somebody ran through it.

Tom Vaddakan, secretary of the party’s media department, came through the small passage between the two houses carrying a note. The note said that Sonia Gandhi had agreed to campaign in the general election that had just been called. He arrived out of breath, and the guard at the Congress president’s door would not let him in. Minutes later the party’s spokesman announced the news to the press while Sitaram Kesri, who was the Congress president, sat in the next room.
Seventy-seven days later Kesri was not president any more, and the instrument used to replace him was found, by his own account, by the man who had run his election campaign.
This is the story of a corridor and a clause: of who controlled what moved along one, and who supplied the other.

The room he was given

Rao resigned the party presidency at the end of September 1996, after being accused of corruption, saying he would not face the charges in court while holding the office. It is usually said that the Congress then elected his successor at 24 Akbar Road. Both halves of that are worth slowing down over, and the address is the easier one.

The party’s Working Committee did meet, and Kidwai dates it to 23 September 1996. He gives no venue. The only man who names one is Mukherjee, who was in the room, and the house he names is not the party’s. A meeting of the Working Committee had been convened, he writes, and members and special invitees were urgently summoned to P.V.’s residence at 9, Motilal Nehru Marg. The committee that chose the next president of the Congress was sitting in the drawing room of the president it was replacing.

What happened in it he records in sequence. Rao explained the situation and then consulted each member present, one by one, about his successor. Mukherjee was called almost at the end. To his utter surprise, he writes, Rao told him that Sitaram Kesri was the near-unanimous choice as party president. He gave his own support, he adds, but I had expected some other outcome. Then Rao announced Kesri’s appointment and, in his own word, symbolically offered him his seat as he moved to another.

Kidwai supplies what Mukherjee leaves out, and it is the sentence that explains the adjective. A.K. Antony was a front-runner and did not stand, and as many as twelve of the eighteen CWC members were Rao’s men. A near-unanimous choice in a room two thirds of which belonged to the man announcing it is not a coincidence. It is arithmetic. The two accounts are one event seen from different distances, and they corroborate rather than compete: Kidwai has the date and the composition, Mukherjee the house and the inside of it.

Was it an election, then? Mukherjee calls it one twice, in the sentences just before those, and his verb settles nothing. He uses the same word a chapter later, under the heading Kesri’s Election, for the contest a few weeks before the 1997 plenary, where Kesri beat Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot and there was a vote to count. One of those was a ballot with two named losers. The other was a consultation whose outcome was announced to the man being consulted, and which his own chapter three calls P.V.’s proposal to appoint him president. The word stretches over both and tells you nothing about either. What separates them is not the verb but the arithmetic in the room, and the arithmetic is in Kidwai.

And the charges were not the whole of why there was a succession to settle. The Congress had fought a general election that year and lost it under him. The Election Commission’s reported result for 1996 gave the party 140 seats against the BJP’s 161, its lowest tally to that date and the first time the BJP had finished as the single largest party. Sitapati, M.L. Fotedar and Mukherjee each reach that number independently, and Fotedar states the authorship of it plainly: the Congress under the leadership of Narasimha Rao could win only 140 seats across the country. So the man going round his own drawing room in September had already lost the country and was leaving under charges. The chair he offered Kesri came with a defeat attached.

Kesri’s first act in that chair that concerns this story was to give Mukherjee a room. Reorganising the party’s departments, he put him in charge of foreign affairs, with an office in the annexe of AICC building (24, Akbar Road). Mukherjee supplies the end date himself: I continued to operate from that office till 1998 when Sonia Gandhi took over as the Congress president.

A room in the party’s own building, given by the president, vacated at the handover. By the end of 1996 the man who would find the clause had a desk at one end of the corridor.

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A circuitous route

In March 1997 the Congress withdrew support from H.D. Deve Gowda’s government, and the way it was done says more about the party than the decision does.

Kidwai writes that Kesri went to the President of India on a quiet Sunday morning, 30 March 1997, and that he kept the Congress in the dark. On the party’s formal bodies that is right: the Working Committee was never consulted. But it was not done alone. Mukherjee names the men who were told and includes himself: Sharad Pawar, who led the party in the Lok Sabha, Jitendra Prasada, Arjun Singh and Mukherjee, with Tariq Anwar possibly a fifth. And then: I drafted a letter addressed to the President informing him of the party’s decision.

The letter was finalised at Kesri’s house, by what Mukherjee calls a few of us, rather than by the Working Committee. Reporters were waiting outside. So Kesri took Mukherjee in his own car, with Mukherjee’s car following, and they drove a deliberately roundabout route to Rashtrapati Bhavan to shake off anyone who might follow. Near the destination Mukherjee got out of the president’s car, got into his own, and went home. Kesri went on alone and brought down the government.

Two things from that year belong on the shelf. In the week of the withdrawal, Congress MPs gathered at Pawar’s house to protest, suspecting the resolution had not been Kesri’s work at all. They thought it was Mukherjee’s, he writes, given that I normally drafted resolutions on behalf of the Congress party.

And when the Congress presidency was contested a few weeks before the August plenary, which it very rarely is, Mukherjee ran the winning campaign. In his words: I threw my lot with Kesri. I essentially became his campaign manager. His house at 13 Talkatora Road virtually became the war room for it. He gives his own reason, and it is not a small one: he believes certain offices should be offered rather than sought, and holds the Congress presidency to be one of them.

The year she was asked

Over twenty-five thousand supporters, Kidwai writes, forced a visibly reluctant Sonia Gandhi onto the dais. The adjective is his; what is recorded is that she sat, and then spoke. I did not realize that I will have to speak here, she told the stadium. The next sentence in his book matters as much: she then produced a prepared text, with quotations from Rajiv Gandhi’s speech at the party’s centenary in 1985. She had the speech with her.

The hall cheered and a section of the delegates began to chant for her. Kesri grew restless, Kidwai writes, and when he rose he turned to her, said she had always been his inspiration, that he was an elected president and therefore an institution, and asked her to maintain a clear link with the party. That was a public request, made from a stage, with her sitting on it. She answered it:

Mamata Banerjee was running a rival session in the same city, and she declined the invitation, associating herself only with the official Congress.

The plenary also ran elections to the Working Committee, in which three men Kesri had kept off his own panel of candidates won seats anyway: Arjun Singh, Sharad Pawar and Ghulam Nabi Azad. Two of the three would press him to go the following March.

What the inquiry then did to the government is in Mukherjee, with his qualifications intact. The interim report, released on 28 August 1997, suggested that the DMK and its leadership had been involved in encouraging Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and his followers. Two sentences on, turning to the politics rather than the document, he adds that the report did not refer to any particular leader or involvement of any party in the conspiracy. Both halves are his, and the second does not retract the first: a finding about a party and its leadership is not a finding about any leader of it. The Congress demanded the DMK ministers be dropped and Gujral refused, and Mukherjee’s verdict on his own party is the hardest sentence in his chapter: Gujral held his ground, insisted the investigation would continue, and refused to play into the hands of the Congress. He resigned on 28 November 1997, the Lok Sabha was dissolved on 4 December, and mid-term elections were called for February.

She campaigned, and held one line throughout: she would not contest a seat. Around her an apparatus assembled, and it is the clearest answer in these two years to what actually reached her. Inputs for her speeches poured in from everywhere, Kidwai writes, and every place on her itinerary was combed for its part in the freedom struggle and its links to Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, with data on caste, sub-caste, religion and voting pattern submitted to her as well. He names nobody who compiled any of it. The apparatus is documented and the authorship of it is not. The Election Commission’s reported result for 1998 gave the Congress 141 seats and the BJP 182.

The clause he found

In the Congress Constitution, there is an elaborate provision for the election of the Congress president but no provision for their removal.

After the February defeat a large number of Congress leaders and workers wanted a change. Read the grammar of the sentences in which he describes it, because it holds all the way through his chapter: they demanded that she be persuaded to take over, and there was a growing sentiment that she should lead. She is the object of other people’s wishes in every one of them.

There was an obstacle. Kesri’s loyalists, led by Tariq Anwar, set about limiting meetings of the Working Committee, which only the president could convene, and Kesri was advised not to call any, because the party’s seniors might use one to ask him to go. A body that cannot meet cannot remove anybody.
Which is the problem Prasada brought to Mukherjee, on the grounds that he knew the party’s constitution and rules better than anyone. I studied the matter, and finally did find a solution.

Then the plan. A meeting of the Working Committee would be requisitioned at short notice, and if the president refused to summon it, the requisitioning members would convene it themselves and take a decision. It was agreed, he adds, that the matter would not be discussed further, to maintain secrecy. The details were worked out at his own residence, with a few more Working Committee members present.

That is the third time his house is the venue in this story. It was the war room of the campaign that elected Kesri. It was where the plan to replace him was settled. And on Kidwai’s account, on the morning Kesri was removed, most of the Working Committee gathered at Mukherjee’s home before the meeting. Two of those three are his own sentences about himself.

And then, one line after describing how he was asked to prepare and operationalise the plan, he writes this:

My involvement in this particular situation was essentially academic.

The useful thing about that sentence is that it is not false. He was asked; he did not seek it; offices should be offered rather than sought, which is his own standard and he applies it consistently. But it sits immediately after prepare and operationalize, and a hundred pages after his own explanation that his colleagues assumed any party resolution was his. The distance between what he did and how he describes having done it is where a memoir keeps its self-respect.

Kidwai describes the same assignment less tenderly: Mukherjee, Antony and Prasada were given the task of sounding Kesri out about retiring gracefully. Being asked to persuade a sitting president to go is not an academic involvement. Both books agree he was instructed, and differ on what he was instructed to do.

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Nine days in March

The Working Committee met on 5 March 1998, and the two accounts of that day differ enough that the difference is itself the finding.

Mukherjee has Kesri convening it, being urged by Prasada, Pawar and Azad to invite her to take charge, refusing, accusing Mukherjee and others of hatching a conspiracy against him, and walking out with Tariq Anwar. Everyone else stayed. As the most senior member present, he writes, he was asked to preside, and did, and the meeting adopted a resolution unanimously. Nobody else records who presided. Kidwai’s 5 March is quieter: Kesri persuaded into calling the meeting with little option, and a Working Committee that asked her to take a more direct role and, unusually, to help choose a new leader of the parliamentary party, a post Kesri himself held. The first move against him was not against the presidency at all.

The reconciliation is that there were two meetings, nine days apart, and his chapter describes the first and omits the second. His own appendix gives away what his narrative does not: the resolution printed there elects her under the clause, with immediate effect, and takes note of a press conference held on 9 March, while his narrative has the Working Committee merely thanking Kesri for an offer to step down. Thanking a man for an offer and electing his successor under an emergency provision are different acts, and only one of them needed the clause.

What happened in between is why. On 9 March Kesri announced that he was resigning. Then, before the news had travelled from 24 Akbar Road to 10 Janpath, he added a rider: he had merely stated an intention, and he would put the resignation to the thousand-odd delegates of the AICC. They have elected me, and I will seek their permission to resign. He had told her, and the Working Committee, that he would hold a press conference to announce his departure. He held it, and then took the departure back.

That rider is the hinge of the whole affair. A resignation that stands needs no emergency clause. A resignation withdrawn does.

What followed, Kidwai calls chaotic. Prasada took charge and told Mukherjee, Antony and the others that the time for direct action had come, though Kidwai also records the split inside that group, which cuts the other way: Pawar and Prasada wanted a surgical operation, Mukherjee and Antony wanted more time. The day before the end, Mukherjee produced a strongly worded draft resolution at a lunch given by Prasada. It asked Kesri to convene the Working Committee, which is his own requisition plan used as designed, and said he should step down in her favour, which is more direct than anything in his own account of himself.

On 14 March 1998 Kesri walked into the hall at 24 Akbar Road and knew at once that something was wrong. Tariq Anwar was the only man who stood up to greet him. When he had sat down, Mukherjee began reading out a resolution thanking him for his services, and invoking the clause. Kesri listened to its provisions and found only this: Arre yeh kya keh rahe ho. What are you saying. He protested that the meeting was unconstitutional and that he was still the Congress chief, while Prasada, to applause, was already announcing Madam Sonia Gandhi as their new leader.

Kidwai adds one sentence about that document which is the most damaging in the corpus and the worst sourced. Party leaders later admitted, he writes, that the provision did not specifically say an elected party president could be removed with its help. He names none of them and gives no date. It is the narrower and more serious version of the objection Kesri himself made to the last, and it is the one nobody will put a name to.

So what was it? The resolution’s own language is resignation: it takes note of his public announcement of 9 March to resign in her favour. Kidwai’s is removal, and he calls it a coup, though the harshest words in his passage are Harish Khare’s in The Hindu rather than his own.1

The reconciliation is sequential rather than semantic: he announced a resignation, withdrew it within the hour, and was removed five days later under a provision written for emergencies. Four other writers on this shelf reach for four different verbs for that fortnight, which is better evidence that the thing was hard to name than any one of them is evidence of what it was.2

The perimeter

Kesri spent more than an hour in his office after walking out. When he came out of it his name board was gone, replaced by a printout reading Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Within minutes the Special Protection Group had moved into the party headquarters. By the time she arrived for the second Working Committee meeting of the day, party leaders who had always driven in were being told to leave their cars on the street and walk.

Last week’s piece was about a house and a gate. This one ends at the same house with a ring of security round it, inside an hour, on the afternoon the party changed hands.

What she did with the office, in Mukherjee’s account, was almost nothing. She was entitled to her own team and opted for continuity, leaving the elected component of the Working Committee intact, altering only the nominated seats, and retaining every office bearer. That is less striking than it looks, and the same book holds the reason: Kesri had done exactly this on taking the same office eighteen months earlier.

And then he writes this.

I was not in Sonia Gandhi’s inner circle in her initial years as Congress president. Her close advisers comprised Natwar Singh, Arjun Singh, K. Karunakaran, Ahmed Patel and Ambika Soni.

It was the party’s conclave at Pachmarhi in September 1998 that brought him close to her, he says, where he was asked to compile the delegates’ recommendations into a declaration. After it she began consulting him more often.

He had a room in that building from 1996, given to him by Sitaram Kesri. By his own sentence, he stopped using it when she took over.

What the record will not say

And the man being removed did not believe the order had come from her. When two of her closest colleagues came to ask him to go quietly, Kesri laughed at them. You have been sent by Arjun Singh and George. It cannot be Soniaji’s words. If she wanted him out, he told them, let her say so.
Nobody records her saying so.

The test for November

Does Article XIX-J appear in Belonging?

No memoir owes its readers the paperwork of its author’s own elevation. But the shape of this record is unusual. The instrument was found by a man who calls his part in it academic, used at a meeting he describes without mentioning the one that followed, and printed by him in an appendix rather than in his narrative. If 544 pages covering six decades find room for the clause, somebody decided it mattered.

And a smaller one. Does the word survive: When? It is one word, it comes from Kesri telling his biographer, and it is the only thing she is recorded saying in the whole sequence. Excerpt from the book ‘24 Akbar Road’👇

Amid many deliberations and behind-the-scenes activities, Kesri finally agreed to see Sonia. The loyalist in him could not resist unilaterally declaring that he was willing to step down as party chief if she was going to take over from him. Kesri later recalled to the author how he was taken aback when she gently asked him, ‘When?’

Kidwai, Rasheed. 24 Akbar Road [Revised and Updated]: A Short History of the People behind the Fall and Rise of the Congress (pp. 199-200). (Function). Kindle Edition.

A book that gives that exchange is willing to be specific about the morning she took the party. A book that gives the month is telling you something too.

A note on sourcing

The corridor, the plenary, the assassination inquiry as a lever, the rider of 9 March, the hall on 14 March and the security at the gate are from Rasheed Kidwai, 24 Akbar Road, Revised and Updated Edition (Hachette India, 2011; ebook 2013), chapter six. He was in none of those rooms and names a source for very few of the scenes in them.

The drawing room of September 1996, the drive to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the war room, the clause, the plan, the meeting of 5 March and the circle of advisers are from Pranab Mukherjee, The Coalition Years: 1996–2012 (Rupa Publications India, 2017), chapters two and three. He is a participant describing himself throughout, which makes him the best witness to these events and an interested one. Both chapters were read end to end for this piece.

The competing verbs for March 1998 come from M.L. Fotedar, K. Natwar Singh, Sanjaya Baru and Neerja Chowdhury.

One limit to carry forward: Mukherjee’s endnote for the contents of the resolution he presided over cites Kidwai’s biography of Sonia Gandhi, so on that element the two books are a single source and he is not an independent witness to his own resolution.

Characterisations belong to whoever made them: forced, visibly reluctant and restless are Kidwai’s. Kesri’s age is not given at any date, because his chapter gives three ages that cannot all be true. The reading of the grammar in chapter three and the three venues at his house are mine.

Next week: 1998 to 2004, and the morning of 17 May.
This series keeps a graded claim ledger behind it. Every correction to a published piece is listed and dated on the corrections page, including the ones that run in my favour.

One was R.K. Dhawan, who had joined Indira Gandhi’s staff in 1962 and stayed with her until her death. The other was Captain Satish Sharma, Rajiv’s friend from his flying-club days.

One of each. It is a small detail in a long night, and it turns out to be a useful key to a question that has followed her through her public life: whose politics did she inherit? One answer is that she trusted her mother-in-law’s instincts over her husband’s, and drew on Indira’s people when it mattered. Four books allow that idea to be tested: Kidwai’s history of the Congress headquarters, Neerja Chowdhury’s study of prime ministers’ decisions, Vinay Sitapati’s biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao, and K. Natwar Singh’s memoir. The idea does not survive in that form. Something more interesting survives in its place.

The case for Indira

The theory has a strong opening exhibit, and it deserves to be stated at full strength.

Read in a row, these look like a pattern. Read one at a time, with the books open, they start to come apart. The first thing to give way is the labels.

The labels do not hold

The theory needs two clean camps, Indira’s people and Rajiv’s. The books will not supply them.
Fotedar is “Indira’s trusted lieutenant” on one page of Kidwai and one of Rajiv’s aides on another. Chowdhury calls Fotedar and Dhawan “Rajiv’s aides” in her account of 1991 and Indira’s elsewhere. Haksar was Indira’s principal secretary, and Natwar Singh records that Rajiv secretly sent him to Beijing before his own visit there. Natwar Singh served Indira, then served as Rajiv’s minister of state. Rao, whom Sitapati calls “Indira’s handyman,” he also calls “Indira and Rajiv’s factotum.”

Even the most obviously Rajiv-era figure will not stay in one box. Vincent George was Rajiv’s private secretary and then Sonia Gandhi’s gatekeeper; Kidwai writes that between 1998 and 2002 anyone seeking an audience with her had to meet George first. But Kidwai also records how George came into the family’s orbit: in 1977, when his boss defected from Indira, he went to Indira and Sanjay and asked them to use his services, and Sanjay took a liking to him.1
Ambika Soni will not sit still either. Chowdhury writes early in her book that Sanjay Gandhi made her Youth Congress president during the Emergency, and much later that Indira spotted her and made her chief. Kidwai places her in Sanjay’s team. And when Chowdhury explains why Sonia was at ease with her, she reaches for something beyond the family: Soni, who had travelled the world with a husband in the foreign service before Indira spotted her, “spoke in an idiom Sonia could relate to.”

Kidwai also reports an observation by Gufran-e-Azam, a Youth Congress leader of the 1970s, that is more revealing than any single label. The cream of the young leadership schooled under Sanjay, Gufran said, still called the shots decades later, and his list includes Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni, Ashok Gehlot and Digvijaya Singh. Several of these, Kidwai writes elsewhere, had enjoyed proximity with Rajiv, and it was they who in 1997 asked Sonia Gandhi to step in and save the party.

So the question cannot be which camp she chose. On these books, the camps overlap almost entirely. The better question is what she was choosing for, and the fullest record of a choice is the one she made in May 1991.

Choosing Rao

The story of how Rao came to lead the Congress is usually told as Haksar’s story, and it comes to us almost entirely through Natwar Singh.

When Sitapati sums up the episode in his own voice, he credits the choice to “P.N. Haksar and Satish Sharma.” 2 It is tempting to read that as Indira’s man and Rajiv’s man arriving independently at the same name. The record does not quite allow it. Haksar reaches us only through Natwar Singh, and Sharma went to her after Rao had approached him. What can be said is narrower: the name reached her from Indira’s former principal secretary, by way of Natwar Singh, and from Rajiv’s closest friend, by way of a call from Rao himself.

Why did she accept it? Sitapati’s explanation is that Rao “threatened no one,” the same reason, he argues, that Indira had chosen him for Andhra Pradesh in 1971 and that Sonia Gandhi would later choose Manmohan Singh. That is Sitapati’s reading, and he states it in his own voice. The only reason the books attribute to her directly comes from an anonymous senior Congressman who saw her that same day: “Sonia had just one concern: Bofors.” He told Sitapati she felt the scandal had cost her husband the 1989 election and left him exposed, and that she wanted Rao to understand it.

Her one recorded concern, in the one decision that shaped everything after it, was Rajiv’s reputation. And not everyone accepts that the decision was hers. Chowdhury notes that R.D. Pradhan, once an adviser to Sonia Gandhi, denied that she had a hand in Rao’s selection.

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The one time she cited Indira

There is one occasion on which she explicitly invoked her mother-in-law’s judgement, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for the original theory.
Years later, Rao made a submission to a panel reviewing the Constitution, which the Congress was boycotting. Kidwai writes that Sonia Gandhi was upset when she learnt of it. Pranab Mukherjee was sent to gauge Rao’s mood, and Rao told him he had done nothing wrong: he had gone to clear Indira Gandhi’s name over the accession of Sikkim. Kidwai writes that Sonia Gandhi then quickly cleared him, saying she had always held him in high regard and that her mother-in-law “too, had had great regard for Rao.”

Here Indira’s authority is cited to settle a question, and it is cited in favour of a man who had just defended Indira. Kidwai sets this inside a fuller picture of the relationship. When she became party chief in 1998, sources close to her said she could not keep Rao in the Working Committee because she did not want constant bickering there; as Leader of the Opposition between 1999 and 2004, she used Pranab Mukherjee to get Rao’s views on national and international questions; and at the Bangalore plenary of March 2001, Kidwai writes, she overruled a majority of party leaders to give Rao importance. His conclusion is that, whatever her disapproval over the Babri Masjid and the slow progress of the assassination inquiry, “she had a healthy regard for Rao.” Natwar Singh, writing after his own break with her, says that she was not very fond of him.3
If the Rao episode shows Indira’s name being used on behalf of one of Indira’s men, an earlier episode is told as showing the reverse.

The gates that did not open for Dhawan

On 1 January 1985, two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, R.K. Dhawan drove to the prime minister’s residence as he did every morning. Chowdhury describes him as seen as Indira’s shadow, the man who had controlled access to her durbar. The gates did not open for his car. He was told to walk to reception, and there to go home. He was out, and so was Nathu Ram, Indira’s attendant, whom she had trusted with the keys to her bedroom.

Who decided? Chowdhury’s account of the scene comes from the journalist Pankaj Vohra, who covered the period, and he told her in 2022 that it was Sonia Gandhi “who decided that they wielded too much power” and should go. That is a single source, given nearly four decades after the event. 4 Chowdhury herself frames the ouster as Rajiv’s: with it, she writes, a more confident Rajiv came to the fore, his own man. Kidwai writes that Dhawan had lost Rajiv’s trust after Indira’s assassination. And Fotedar, also Indira’s aide, was not removed; Chowdhury writes that Dhawan’s exit suited him and Arun Nehru and helped them take control of the prime minister’s house.

So the attribution is contested. But if Vohra is right, Sonia Gandhi’s earliest recorded part in the politics of the prime minister’s household was not to lean on Indira’s people. It was to see some of them out. Six years later, on the night Rajiv was killed, she sent for Dhawan.

One reading, and it is mine, is that she judged people by their position at a given moment rather than by whose service they came from. In 1985, on Vohra’s account, Dhawan had too much power in a new prime minister’s house. In 1991, on a night when, Kidwai writes, she remembered only too well what had followed Indira’s assassination, he was someone who had lived through such a night before.

What the rest of the record shows

The wider evidence points the same way: a circle drawn from every era of the family’s service.

The leaders who, in Kidwai’s account, drew her into politics in 1997, Digvijaya Singh, Gehlot, Ahmed Patel and Vayalar Ravi, had enjoyed proximity with Rajiv and appear on Gufran’s list of Sanjay’s pupils. Part of what Kidwai calls Team Rajiv joined her first campaign in 1998, and the material it prepared drew on each place’s links “to Indira and Rajiv”; Kidwai’s verdict on that campaign is “’Indira II’ was in the making.” At the party office, he writes, she appeared “in the Rajiv mould,” insisting on concept notes and written briefs; it is the last item before he writes “In spite of these shortcomings.”5

Some Indira-era figures fared badly. Sitaram Kesri, who, Kidwai writes, kept recalling how Indira had made him party treasurer, was removed as president in March 1998, after the election losses, to make way for her. Kidwai’s summary of that moment names other camps: when she took over, many leaders who claimed closeness to Rajiv, to Rao or to Kesri lost out. And Chowdhury, explaining why Manmohan Singh rather than Pranab Mukherjee suited her as prime minister, writes that Mukherjee had been number two in government since Indira’s day, “But she did not trust him.” He would, as a senior Congress leader put it, “informally criticize her functioning.”

Her most consequential appointment came from a different line altogether. Kidwai records that Manmohan Singh had played only an advisory role under both Indira and Rajiv, that Rajiv had once called the Planning Commission he led “a bunch of jokers,” 6 and that his discovery was Rao’s biggest contribution. She made him prime minister.

Kidwai’s own verdict on the comparison is carefully split. Indira is her role model, he writes, but her style of functioning is “sharply different” from her mother-in-law’s, who was “not known to be particularly democratic” in the way she ran the party. And once, Chowdhury records, when she was compared to the other Mrs Gandhi, she said quietly: “I am not Nehru’s daughter.”7

What the pattern says, and what it does not

It is tempting to turn a pattern of choices into a portrait of character. These books do not license that. The most colourful material about her temperament comes from Natwar Singh’s 2014 memoir, written after a bitter break, and its adjectives cannot be checked. What can be checked is what she did, and on that evidence three things can be said, each as a reading of the record rather than a finding about her mind.

First, the people around her came from the family’s whole history of service, not from one reign of it. Indira’s aides, Rajiv’s friends and Sanjay’s Youth Congress cohort all appear at her side, and the same individuals carry different labels in different books.

Second, at the two moments of 1991 that the books record in detail, the night of the assassination and the choice of a party leader, people from both reigns were in the room or on the telephone. Whether that was a habit of hers or simply the shape of the family’s staff, the books cannot say.

Third, where her own concern is recorded, it was her husband’s legacy. The only reason the books attribute to her in the choice of Rao is Bofors. The one time she is quoted invoking Indira, it was to defend a man who had just defended Indira.
The theory that she followed Indira’s instincts is not wrong so much as too narrow. What the books show is someone who inherited an entire household of loyalties, and drew on all of it.

Takeaways

The labels overlap. Fotedar, Haksar, Natwar Singh, Rao, Ambika Soni and even Vincent George each served, or came through, more than one Gandhi, and the books disagree about which camp several of them belonged to. A theory built on clean camps starts from a sorting the sources do not support.

The Haksar story has one witness. Every account of Haksar’s role in 1991 traces to Natwar Singh, told in a 2012 column, a 2013 book and a 2014 memoir. His memoir also has her consulting Fotedar.

The Rajiv-side voice in 1991 was not independent. Satish Sharma put Rao’s name to her after Rao had telephoned him. Sitapati credits the choice to Haksar and Sharma together, but the two strands are not separate witnesses to her judgement.

Her one recorded concern was Rajiv’s legacy. An anonymous senior Congressman told Sitapati that, on Rao, she had just one concern: Bofors. Sitapati’s own explanation, that Rao threatened no one, is his reading.

She cited Indira once, on behalf of a man who had defended Indira. Kidwai records her clearing Rao by invoking her mother-in-law’s regard for him, and overruling party leaders to give him importance in 2001.

Rajiv’s era shaped her working method; Indira’s shaped her campaign image. Kidwai places her office practice “in the Rajiv mould” and her 1998 campaign as “Indira II.” Both are his phrases, and they sit in the same book.

The test is still to come. Belonging may show whom she credits with teaching her politics. If she names Indira’s household, the theory regains ground. If she names Rajiv, or no one, the record above stands.

सितंबर 1996 और मार्च 1998 के बीच, भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस में एक नाटकीय आंतरिक सत्ता परिवर्तन हुआ, जो पी.वी. के इस्तीफे से विकसित हुआ। नरसिम्हा राव से लेकर सीताराम केसरी के अल्पकालिक राष्ट्रपति पद तक और इसकी परिणति सोनिया गांधी के उत्थान के रूप में हुई। इस अवधि को गंभीर चुनावी असफलताओं, तीव्र आंतरिक संघर्ष और पार्टी संवैधानिक प्रावधानों की नवीन तैनाती द्वारा परिभाषित किया गया था।

ऐतिहासिक रिकॉर्ड से महत्वपूर्ण निष्कर्षों में शामिल हैं:

* अभूतपूर्व निष्कासन तंत्र: कांग्रेस संविधान में पार्टी अध्यक्ष के चुनाव के लिए स्पष्ट प्रक्रियाएँ थीं, लेकिन किसी को हटाने के लिए शून्य प्रावधान थे। सीताराम केसरी को हटाने के लिए, प्रणब मुखर्जी ने अनुच्छेद XIX-J की पहचान की - एक आपातकालीन खंड जो कांग्रेस कार्य समिति (सीडब्ल्यूसी) को बिना शर्त कार्रवाई करने की अनुमति देता है, जो छह महीने के भीतर अखिल भारतीय कांग्रेस समिति (एआईसीसी) के अनुसमर्थन के अधीन है।

* मार्च 1998 का ​​आंतरिक तख्तापलट: सीताराम केसरी ने 9 मार्च 1998 को पद छोड़ने के अपने इरादे की घोषणा की, लेकिन तुरंत एक महत्वपूर्ण शर्त संलग्न की: वह सीधे एआईसीसी प्रतिनिधियों से इस्तीफा देने की अनुमति मांगेंगे जिन्होंने उन्हें चुना था। इस पैंतरेबाज़ी को रोकने के लिए, वरिष्ठ नेताओं ने 14 मार्च 1998 को अनुच्छेद XIX-J को लागू किया, एक घंटे के भीतर केसरी को हटा दिया और उनके कार्यालय नेमप्लेट को सोनिया गांधी के नाम वाले प्रिंटआउट के साथ बदल दिया।

* प्रणब मुखर्जी का निर्णायक विरोधाभास: प्रणब मुखर्जी ने इन परिवर्तनों के प्राथमिक परिचालन वास्तुकार के रूप में कार्य किया - 1997 में केसरी के अभियान प्रबंधक के रूप में कार्य किया, प्रमुख प्रस्तावों का मसौदा तैयार किया, केसरी को बाहर करने के लिए कानूनी तंत्र तैयार किया, निष्कासन प्रस्ताव को पढ़ा, और सोनिया गांधी को कांग्रेस संसदीय दल (सीपीपी) का नेतृत्व करने में सक्षम बनाने वाले संशोधन का मसौदा तैयार किया। इस केंद्रीय परिचालन भूमिका के बावजूद, मुखर्जी ने अपनी भागीदारी को “अनिवार्य रूप से अकादमिक” बताया और सितंबर 1998 में पचमढ़ी सम्मेलन तक छह महीने तक सोनिया गांधी के तत्काल आंतरिक दायरे से बाहर रहे।

* सोनिया गांधी की व्यवस्थित उन्नति: पार्टी अध्यक्ष पद के लिए सोनिया गांधी की राह में प्रत्यक्ष प्रशासनिक निर्देशों की पूर्ण अनुपस्थिति के साथ उच्च दृश्यता की विशेषता थी। 1997 में चुपचाप प्राथमिक पार्टी की सदस्यता लेने से लेकर 1998 के मध्यावधि चुनावों में बड़े पैमाने पर प्रचार करने तक, उन्होंने केसरी को हटाने की प्रक्रिया से सार्वजनिक दूरी बनाए रखते हुए पार्टी के वरिष्ठ नेतृत्व को अपनी ओर से संगठनात्मक बाधाओं को खत्म करने की अनुमति दी।

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उत्तराधिकार गतिशीलता: राव से केसरी (सितंबर 1996)

सितंबर 1996 में राष्ट्रपति पद का उत्तराधिकार राजनीतिक हार और निवर्तमान राष्ट्रपति पी.वी. के आसपास के कानूनी दबाव के कारण शुरू हुआ था। नरसिम्हा राव.

चुनावी हार और इस्तीफे का संदर्भ

राव के नेतृत्व में, कांग्रेस को 1996 के आम चुनावों में ऐतिहासिक हार का सामना करना पड़ा, और भारतीय जनता पार्टी (भाजपा) की 161 सीटों के मुकाबले केवल 140 सीटें प्राप्त हुईं। यह पहली बार है जब भाजपा संसद में सबसे बड़ी पार्टी बनकर उभरी है। लंबित भ्रष्टाचार के आरोपों का सामना करते हुए, राव ने सितंबर 1996 के अंत में घोषणा की कि वह पद पर रहते हुए अदालती कार्यवाही का सामना करने से बचने के लिए पार्टी अध्यक्ष पद से इस्तीफा दे देंगे।

1996 लोकसभा चुनाव टैली:

├── बीजेपी: 161 सीटें (सबसे बड़ी पार्टी)

└── कांग्रेस: 140 सीटें (उस तारीख तक की सबसे कम संख्या)

9, मोतीलाल नेहरू मार्ग पर चयन

जबकि पारंपरिक आख्यान राव के उत्तराधिकारी का चुनाव पार्टी मुख्यालय (24 अकबर रोड) पर करते हैं, प्राथमिक वृत्तांत साक्ष्य एक अलग स्थान और प्रक्रिया का खुलासा करते हैं:

* स्थान: 23 सितंबर 1996 को, राव ने पार्टी मुख्यालय के बजाय 9, मोतीलाल नेहरू मार्ग स्थित अपने निजी आवास पर तत्काल सीडब्ल्यूसी बुलाई।

* प्रक्रिया: अपने ड्राइंग रूम में बैठकर राव ने सीडब्ल्यूसी सदस्यों से व्यक्तिगत रूप से परामर्श किया। बैठक के अंत में, राव ने घोषणा की कि सीताराम केसरी “लगभग सर्वसम्मत पसंद” थे और उन्होंने प्रतीकात्मक रूप से केसरी को अपनी कुर्सी की पेशकश की।

*आंतरिक अंकगणित: ए.के. प्रमुख दावेदार एंटनी ने दौड़ने से इनकार कर दिया। “लगभग सर्वसम्मत” सर्वसम्मति राजनीतिक अंकगणित से प्रेरित थी: 18 सीडब्ल्यूसी सदस्यों में से 12 राव के वफादार थे, जिससे यह सुनिश्चित हुआ कि राव ने परिणाम पर सख्त नियंत्रण बनाए रखा।

* कार्यालय आवंटन: राष्ट्रपति पद संभालने पर, केसरी ने प्रणब मुखर्जी को विदेशी मामलों के प्रबंधन के लिए 24 अकबर रोड पर एआईसीसी भवन के एनेक्सी में एक कार्यालय आवंटित किया। मार्च 1998 में सोनिया गांधी के नेतृत्व संभालने तक मुखर्जी ने इसी कमरे से काम किया।

Rasheed Kidwai records that when the Congress moved into 24 Akbar Road in 1978, the house had one advantage: a wicket gate to 10 Janpath. Who got through, who was kept out, and how much of the arrangement was ever hers.

It was on a chilly January morning in 1978, Kidwai writes, that Shoban Singh and twenty other karamcharis … first entered the portals of 24 Akbar Road. They were there because the party needed a building, and because the house it might otherwise have used was full.
The Gandhi family was living at 12 Willingdon Crescent, lent to them by Mohammad Yunus, and Kidwai lists who was in it. Indira, Rajiv, his wife Sonia, their children, Rahul and Priyanka, Sanjay, Maneka, and five dogs – all moved in, leaving virtually no scope or space for any political activity from there. So the party went elsewhere, and one of the people filling the house it could not use was Sonia Gandhi.
Kidwai is candid about what it got instead. Five barely furnished bedrooms, a living and dining hall, a guest room. Outhouses in complete neglect. A garden of unruly hedges and weeds. Across the road, the residence of the Chief of the Indian Air Force, and the Intelligence Bureau’s political surveillance unit, which, he notes in a parenthesis, still exists. And, he writes, one advantage: a wicket gate, linking it to 10 Janpath.

Two earlier pieces stood at this door

Episode 4 looked at the people who controlled access to her: the gatekeepers. Vinay Sitapati names them, Mathai for Nehru, Dhawan for Indira, George for Rajiv and then for her, in a sentence that does the work of a chapter: in the durbar culture of Delhi, blessed are the gatekeepers. Kidwai adds the detail. Between 1998 and 2002, Vincent George had unlimited access to her, and anybody seeking an audience, however important, had to meet George first. He also records that George was marginalized later.

Episode 6 set out the routine P.V. Narasimha Rao kept until the middle of 1993, taken from Sitapati’s reconstruction from Rao’s private papers and interviews. A telephone call about twice a week, a meeting about once a week, and Rao making the journey to 10 Janpath.

Both of those pieces were about the people at the door. This one is about the building, and about a question neither of them asked. How much of the arrangement was hers?

Four arrangements before hers

Kidwai’s is the book in this corpus best placed to answer that, because his subject is an institution rather than a self. That is my judgement of the book, not his claim for it. Read him for arrangements instead of decisions, and the same party passes in front of you under one leader after another.

The account of Indira Gandhi comes from R.K. Dhawan, and it carries his name because of where it sits in the book. Explaining, in Kidwai’s report, the sequence of events that led to her death, Dhawan said that usually Indira held a durbar for visitors from all over the country at her residence, 1 Safdarjung Road, at 8 a.m. every day, and that whenever she returned from a trip in the evening, the next morning’s durbar was cancelled.

The passage around that recollection is about the Thakkar commission’s recommendation that his own role be investigated, his denial of it, and the clean chit he was given. Useful testimony, then, and not neutral testimony.

Sanjay Gandhi rarely visited 24 Akbar Road or 10 Janpath, Kidwai writes, and yet each day at Willingdon Crescent and later at 1 Safdarjung Road, he would be given full details of the party leaders visiting the office, their interactions and other deliberations. Very few files recorded deliberations; he mostly issued verbal orders, carried by Dhawan, Ambika and other trusted associates.

The information travelled to him, in other words, rather than he to the office. Except that elsewhere in the same book, Kidwai writes that Sanjay’s room at 24 Akbar Road was an open house for the dozens of party leaders arriving from all over the country. Neither passage gives a year, and the book does not reconcile them, so both go in side by side and you can hold them as he leaves them.

Rajiv Gandhi, in his mother’s lifetime, held court on the lawns of 24 Akbar Road, and Kidwai records how the staff read him. Most often, their response towards a particular party leader mirrored Rajiv’s reaction to him. If Rajiv greeted or hugged a visiting leader, George, Dhawan and Fotedar would also show him warmth and affection. If Rajiv chided or looked annoyed with a visitor, the palace guards would give him snide looks or express their inability to arrange a private meeting.

Rajiv’s open durbar, he concludes, was often a good barometer of the political equations in the party. Most often, and often: two hedges, both his, and both stay.

Sitaram Kesri, party president from 1996 to 1998, ran something different again. Kesri’s late-night durbars, held in his bedroom, were well attended. He was a widower and even middle-rung party leaders had free access to his Purana Qila Road house. Adjacent to the bedroom was a smaller anteroom, which was used for serious political deliberations. Kidwai records that the second room was there, and what it was for.

Four leaders, four arrangements, and all of them in place before she had one.

And then hers

At 24 Akbar Road, Kidwai writes, she appeared in the Rajiv mould. His two sentences are these.

At 24 Akbar Road, Sonia appeared in the Rajiv mould and placed greater emphasis on the written word than on verbal communication. She insisted upon ‘concept notes’ and ‘written briefs’ as were in vogue during the Rajiv years.

He says it twice, in two consecutive sentences: the Rajiv mould in the first, the Rajiv years in the second.

That is the narrowest true finding in this piece, and the narrowness is the point. One element of the arrangement, the written brief, came back from the Rajiv years, and Kidwai says so in the same breath as he records it as her practice. What his two sentences will not carry is the larger claim, that the arrangement as a whole was inherited.

Two things cut against even the small version, and both belong here rather than three sections later.

The first is that Kidwai weighs the whole the other way. Two paragraphs on, Kidwai writes:

Unlike Indira and Rajiv, Sonia had not been brought up in a prime minister's house nor groomed as a successor to a towering leader. So she lacked a sense of entitlement and remained wary of flattery.

The second is about where his Rajiv-mould sentences sit rather than what they say, and it cuts against what I would like from them. They come at the end of a run of criticisms, none of them dated. Here is that run in his own words and his own order, with the opening clause and the tail of the Pokhran sentence cut.

… there are complaints that the party president’s tour programmes are organized without proper consultation with the state units. The nomination of candidates for the Rajya Sabha elections was also criticized for lack of consultation with the respective state units. Other committees, such as the constitution review committee headed by K. Karunakaran and the ethical and moral committee headed by A.K. Antony, failed to submit any concrete suggestions. There was a feeling among some members of these committees that their work was not being taken seriously. The foreign and defence affairs committee, headed by K. Natwar Singh, was embarrassed after the Pokhran nuclear tests …

The two sentences about the Rajiv mould come next, exactly as quoted above. Then a break in the page. Then: In spite of these shortcomings, on 13 May 2004, Sonia turned the tables. Later in that paragraph, Sonia put a stop to the Nehru–Gandhi practice of playing musical chairs with the chief ministers of the party-ruled states.

So Kidwai files the Rajiv mould among her shortcomings rather than her strengths. It is the last thing he writes before the words these shortcomings, and reading his placement that way is mine rather than his. The sentences this piece leans on hardest are, in their own author’s hands, a complaint about her.

The paragraph after differed significantly lists how she differed, and it opens with a practice Kidwai credits to her: calling meetings of the chief ministers of Congress-ruled states even while the party was out of office. What they were for he gives in one sentence, and both halves of it belong here: The aim of these conclaves was not to monitor the functioning of the Congress-ruled states; rather, they served to familiarize Sonia with the finer points of governance and to prepare her for more important assignments in the future. They belong to a later piece. He records a second practice of hers as well. As the Working Committee met less often, Sonia began the practice of summoning important leaders like Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil, Ahmed Patel and Pranab Mukherjee, usually present in Delhi, for consultations before taking any important decision.

The finding is therefore narrower than a neat one would be. The written brief came back from the Rajiv years, and Kidwai says so. The conclaves and the consultations she began, and Kidwai says that too. He files the first among her shortcomings and the second among the ways she differed, which is how I read his ordering; he conceals none of it, and you should know how he weighs it before deciding how you do.

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What went between the houses

Kidwai describes the party office as it was when he wrote, in the present tense, and the picture is not flattering. Far from being Wi-Fi-enabled, most AICC office-bearers – including the general secretaries – do not even have personal computers.
So the paper walks. Every communication or office order, he writes, moves in physical form from table to table, back and forth from 24 Akbar Road to 10 Janpath, carried each day by several peons and messengers.
His next sentences belong beside that one, all of them.

The party’s highest body changed its habits too, and here Kidwai’s dates quarrel with one another. In one sentence, Working Committee meetings became less frequent after October 2003. Two sentences later, during 1998–2002, there used to be at least a dozen CWC meetings in a year. A few lines on, there were dozens of meetings every year after she took over in March 1998, and the trend continued till 2000, after which they have become few and far between. The decline is consistent across his book; the year it began is not. So here are all three, and I choose none.

The reason he reports comes from a close Sonia aide, who claims the leadership’s ‘indifferent’ attitude towards the CWC grew when she realized that the body, which had more than forty members, had become too ‘unwieldy and ungainly’ for any meaningful or focused discussion. Where the committee met is a separate sentence, and a hedged one. Even CWC meetings have been known to be held more at Sonia’s residence at 10 Janpath, instead of the party office. Kidwai gives it no date. It follows his sentence that both Sonia and Rahul, who was drafted as AICC general secretary in 2006, avoided visiting 24 Akbar Road regularly.

That, as I read it, is what the link carried. Paper by hand, back and forth, and on Kidwai’s hedged account some of the party’s highest meetings moving to the house. He records both. He does not connect them, and nor do I.

Who could not get in

As the general election of 2009 approached, a second house became a rival to the first. 15 Gurudwara Rakabganj Road, Kidwai writes, belonged to Shobhana Bhartia and was donated to the party. Every day, seventeen senior Congress leaders would meet at 11 a.m. in the ‘war-room’ and reassemble there at 6 p.m. Jairam Ramesh was in overall charge.

The second kind of door is a refusal at her own, and both instances come from K. Natwar Singh.

That is the upstream question in its plainest form: the refusal followed a report of what he said, not what he said. Natwar Singh does not name who carried the word to her, and I will not guess. It rests on him alone, and he is also the man who says he put it right.

Now read the middle sentence again. That she refused to see Jairam Ramesh is a scene he reports. That banishment was the ultimate manifestation of her displeasure is his characterisation of her, written by a man dropped from government in 2005, in a 2014 book that calls her Machiavellian and authoritarian. The Telegraph reported in 2014, citing Congress sources, that he had written of her complimentarily in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Episode 4 printed, from the same page of his book, the other end of this channel. When his daughter Ritu died on 9 May 2002, he writes, she came to his house immediately on being told and spent many hours with the family. On his return from a trip abroad, which he does not date, her opening words were that she had missed him. So the channel that carried a condolence visit is the channel that could be closed against a man who, in Natwar Singh’s words, *could not take it beyond a week. One channel, two settings, one witness’s page. Kamal Nath’s door and the war room are something else: the party’s habit under several leaders, and a separate point.

The witness is also in the scene

Natwar Singh is the intercessor in both of the refusals at her door that he records. Arjun Singh came to his house. Jairam Ramesh came to see him. In both he is the man people reach when they cannot reach her, and in both he speaks to her and she relents. He tells Jairam Ramesh’s story first, and introduces Arjun Singh’s as the second incident that I know of which invited Sonia’s wrath. By his own count, then, he knows of two such incidents, and he is the go-between in both.

The same page carries more. Episode 4 printed his line that he was at 10 Janpath almost every day. Beside it, he writes: I was seen as one of her closest confidants and some ‘well-wishers’ pumped me, saying, ‘You are the best troubleshooter she has.’ My reply was: ‘Nonsense.’ And then: Sonia used to worry a lot about the security of her grandchildren, as well as Priyanka’s safety. I promised to speak to Brajesh Mishra and did sound him out later. He promised to do the needful discreetly, as Sonia had wished. That she worried is his statement of her mind. That he spoke to Brajesh Mishra is his record of his own act.
He is the channel in both directions on that page, as I read it: petitioners in to her, her concern out to the government of the day, and in each he presents himself as the one who acts. Then, one page on, the compliment comes back.

After Arjun Singh was finally seen, Natwar Singh writes, he drove straight to my house from 10 Janpath and thanked me profusely: ‘Natwar Singhji, at this level in politics, no one makes the intervention you made on my behalf.’ Natwar Singh’s comment: It was a compliment I deeply appreciated. He refuses the title of troubleshooter on one page and prints the evidence for it, gratefully, on the next.

None of which makes his scenes false. It means the sole witness to both refusals is also the hero of both, and Episode 6 has already noted that what grows across his retellings is his own agency. Read the scenes, and discount the part he writes for himself.

The last arrival

There is one more arrival at 24 Akbar Road to record.

Neerja Chowdhury was there, and her notes say so. In her words: When his body draped in the national flag was brought to the Congress headquarters, it was stopped at the gates which had been shut. The flower-bedecked cortege was not allowed entry into 24, Akbar Road .

Sonia Gandhi was there. Sitapati writes that the carriage stopped on the pavement outside, as Sonia Gandhi and others came out to pay their respects, and The Tribune‘s report filed that day has her and Manmohan Singh present at AICC headquarters along with several senior party colleagues to receive the body.
So who kept the gate shut? The record does not settle it, and the four accounts do not agree. Kidwai puts it on the party: Surprisingly, Sonia and Manmohan’s healthy regard for Rao did nothing to prevail upon the party to let Rao’s body be kept inside 24 Akbar Road for a few hours as a mark of respect.

Sitapati records two Congress voices, neither named. A friend of Rao’s remembers asking a senior Congresswoman to let the body in, and her reply, ‘The gate does not open’; the friend says that was untrue. Another Congressman puts it on her: ‘We were expecting the gate to be opened . . . but no order came. Only one person could give that order.’ He adds, ‘She did not give it.’ Neither quotation carries a note of its own in Sitapati’s book.

Manmohan Singh, who was present, told Sitapati he has no knowledge of why the body was not allowed in. And Chowdhury, who was also present, names nobody; the sentence after hers says that Rao’s role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid troubled the Congress leadership—and they did not forgive him till the end, which she sets beside the scene and does not offer as its cause.
Four accounts, one shut gate, and no verdict, because the evidence does not give one.

The test for November

The obvious question about Belonging is whether she describes being surrounded by gatekeepers. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that she will not.
Here is the narrower test. Does anyone in the book fail to reach her? A memoir written from inside an arrangement like this one has no reason to notice the arrangement. Doors open, briefs arrive, people are in the room or they are not. And the ones who are not do not appear, because they were never there to be remembered. A book in which nobody is ever turned away is telling you where it was written from.
And a narrower one still. Does the morning of 24 December 2004 appear? If it does, notice two things: whether she says she came out to the body, and whether anybody, in her telling, kept the gate shut.

A note on sourcing

The building, the link, the arrangements of Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Sitaram Kesri, the Rajiv-mould sentence and the criticisms around it, the conclaves, the consultations, the papers carried between the houses, the Working Committee’s frequency and venue, Kamal Nath at the door and the 2009 war room all come from Rasheed Kidwai, 24 Akbar Road, Revised and Updated Edition (Hachette India, 2011; ebook 2013). His is the book in this corpus best placed to show whether a routine persisted, because its subject is the party rather than a person in it, and that assessment is mine.

The Indira Gandhi durbar is not Kidwai’s observation. It is R.K. Dhawan’s, given in his account of the events that led to her death, in a passage about the inquiry that named him.

The refusals of Arjun Singh and Jairam Ramesh, the condolence visit, the Brajesh Mishra errand and the troubleshooter exchange come from K. Natwar Singh, One Life Is Not Enough (Rupa, 2014). He is the single source for each and the intercessor in both refusals.

Rao’s routine and the scene at the gate are from Vinay Sitapati, Half-Lion (2016), from Rao’s private papers, newspapers of the day and interviews.

Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide (2023), was present at 24 Akbar Road on 24 December 2004, as her own notes record.

The Tribune‘s report is from its edition of 25 December 2004.

The 2018 observation at Rakabganj Road is mine.

Most of the scenes in this piece are undated in their sources and are not dated here: the refusals of Arjun Singh and Jairam Ramesh, which period each of Kidwai’s accounts of Sanjay describes, when the written briefs began under her, and when the Working Committee began meeting at her house. Where a source gives no date, supplying one from a passage’s position on a page is an invention. The two pages of Natwar Singh’s book that carry both refusals run from May 2002 back to February 1997, which is reason enough.
Spellings of durbar are standardised throughout.

Next week: 1996 to 1998, and how she came to take over the party in March 1998.

This series keeps a graded claim ledger behind it. Every correction to a published piece is listed and dated on the corrections page, including the ones that run in my favour.

इस पॉडकास्ट में इंडियन नेशनल कांग्रेस पार्टी के अंदर प्रशासनिक ढांचे, लोगों के मिलने-जुलने के तरीके, संस्थागत आदतों और ‘गेटकीपिंग’ (कौन किससे मिल सकता है, इसे तय करने) के तौर-तरीकों का पूरा ब्यौरा देता है, जैसा कि कई ऐतिहासिक वृत्तांतों में बताया गया है। यह विश्लेषण 24 अकबर रोड स्थित पार्टी मुख्यालय और 10 जनपथ स्थित नेतृत्व के आवास के बीच भौतिक और कामकाज से जुड़े संबंधों पर केंद्रित है। इसमें यह बताया गया है कि कैसे संगठनात्मक अधिकार, निर्णय लेने की प्रक्रियाएं और लोगों की पहुंच का तरीका इंदिरा गांधी, संजय गांधी, राजीव गांधी और सीताराम केसरी से लेकर सोनिया गांधी तक, कांग्रेस नेतृत्व के अलग-अलग दौर में बदला।

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मुख्य बातें इस प्रकार हैं:

संस्थागत जुड़ाव: 24 अकबर रोड और 10 जनपथ के बीच संबंध की शुरुआत एक साधारण भौतिक विशेषता से हुई—एक छोटा गेट (विकेट गेट) जो तब मौजूद था जब पार्टी ने 1978 में 24 अकबर रोड का कब्जा लिया था। दशकों में, यह भौतिक जुड़ाव सत्ता के एक मजबूत केंद्र में बदल गया, जिससे पार्टी मुख्यालय और अध्यक्ष के निजी आवास के बीच सत्ता का केंद्र बदलता रहा।

पहुंच के तरीकों में बदलाव: पार्टी नेताओं ने व्यवस्थित रूप से उन तरीकों को बदला जिनसे जानकारी उन तक पहुंचती थी और जिनसे लोगों को उनसे मिलने की अनुमति मिलती थी। इन तरीकों में इंदिरा गांधी के रोज़ सुबह लगने वाले दरबार और संजय गांधी का ज़ुबानी संदेश पहुंचाने वालों पर निर्भरता से लेकर राजीव गांधी की लॉन में बातचीत, सीताराम केसरी की देर रात बेडरूम में बैठकें और सोनिया गांधी द्वारा लिखित ब्रीफ, राज्य के मुख्यमंत्रियों के सम्मेलन और सीधी अनौपचारिक बातचीत को संस्थागत रूप देना शामिल है।

गेटकीपिंग और सत्ता के निर्णायक: नेतृत्व तक पहुंच को ऐतिहासिक रूप से खास भरोसेमंद लोगों (जैसे एम.ओ. मथाई, आर.के. धवन और विंसेंट जॉर्ज) द्वारा नियंत्रित किया जाता रहा है। लोगों को न मिलने देना अक्सर राजनीतिक अनुशासन या बाहर रखने के एक हथियार के तौर पर इस्तेमाल किया जाता था, जैसा कि अर्जुन सिंह और जयराम रमेश जैसे वरिष्ठ नेताओं को बाहर रखने और चुनाव “वॉर रूम” के सीमित कामकाज में देखा गया।

ऐतिहासिक घटनाएं: संस्थागत गेटकीपिंग का एक स्पष्ट उदाहरण 24 दिसंबर, 2004 को देखने को मिला, जब पूर्व प्रधानमंत्री और कांग्रेस अध्यक्ष पी.वी. नरसिम्हा राव के पार्थिव शरीर को 24 अकबर रोड में प्रवेश करने से रोक दिया गया, जिससे पार्टी नेतृत्व की मौजूदगी के बावजूद अंतिम संस्कार का जुलूस बाहर फुटपाथ पर ही रुका रहा।

Last updated 3 October 2026.

How this page works

Every factual statement in this series maps to a graded row in a working claim ledger. When a row changes, the change is logged with the date and with the direction it cuts: against the argument being built, for it, or neither.

Corrections that run in my favour are published here too. A correction log containing only embarrassments is a selection, and a selection is not a record.

Three rules govern this page.

Both dates, always. The date a piece was published and the date the correction was made. A correction with one date does not tell you how long the error stood.

Nothing is quietly edited. Where a published sentence was wrong, the sentence stays and a dated note sits above it. The correction is visible in the piece as well as here.

What is not here. The working ledger behind this page holds several times as many corrections as the page lists. Most were caught before anything was published, or concern the ledger's own housekeeping: a mis-numbered row, a version stamp, a search run badly and re-run. Those are not corrections to anything you read, and listing them here would inflate this page with things you cannot check. The entries below are the ones that touched a published piece.

Episode 1 · Ten Things Rasheed Kidwai Expects Sonia Gandhi’s Memoir to Cover

Published 29 August 2026

Identified 25 September 2026. Corrected 3 October 2026. The piece says she chose him in 1991 without naming an office. She chose a Congress president, not a prime minister. Rao was elected Congress president on 29 May 1991 and sworn in as prime minister on 21 June, twenty-three days later, with the premiership contested in between. 🚩 This correction was logged as applied on 25 September and was not applied. The note reached the working ledger and never reached the piece. Against, twice over.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The standfirst says seventy-five days before the memoir lands. From 29 August to 10 November is seventy-three days. Against.

Supported, 3 October 2026, and recorded because it runs my way. This piece states that Rao offered a line to 10 Janpath so she could call whenever she wished. That is correct, and it is the direction the source gives. Episode 6 had to correct a later working note that reversed it. The published record was right from the start. For.

Episode 2 · She Said She Would Write It Herself

Published 5 September 2026

Corrected 3 October 2026. The phrase a leader in reserve, in the sixth of the seven things to settle, is not his. The piece gives it as the Congress manager’s own phrase. A full-text search of M.L. Fotedar’s memoir, The Chinar Leaves, returns zero occurrences of it. It is Neerja Chowdhury’s rendering of her interviews with him, and it should have carried her name. The same error ran in the title of Episode 5 three weeks later. Against.

Identified 25 September 2026. Corrected 3 October 2026. The fifth thing to settle reads she chose a prime minister in 1991. She chose a Congress president. Rao was elected Congress president on 29 May 1991 and sworn in as prime minister on 21 June, twenty-three days later, with the premiership contested in between. 🚩 This correction was logged as applied on 25 September and was not applied. The note reached the working ledger and never reached the piece. Against, twice over.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The standfirst says the five books that contain her. Those are not the only books that contain her, and this piece says so itself, listing Rasheed Kidwai’s biography of 2003, Rani Singh’s of 2011 and Javier Moro’s novelised life. The sentence means the five books about other people that carry substantial material on her. Neither for nor against: loose phrasing contradicted within the same piece.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The piece reports empty-chapter counts, that six of Sitapati’s chapters do not mention her and thirteen of Natwar Singh’s twenty-three. Those counts are contaminated by how much of a life each book covers. Natwar Singh’s include chapters on a diplomatic career in the 1950s and 1960s, years before she arrived in India. An empty chapter is informative only where a mention was reasonable to expect. Against.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The closing section says seventy-six days. From 5 September to 10 November is sixty-six days. Against.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The piece states that seven corrections are already in the log and six run against the argument. That figure is superseded. It was accurate on 5 September. The entries on this page, dated, are what it stood in for. Neither for nor against.

Supported, 3 October 2026, and recorded because it runs my way. The seventh thing to settle argues that the 2004 scene has grown over time, being absent from the 2014 book of the only man in the room and appearing in a 2023 book attributed to him. Chowdhury’s notes date her interview with K. Natwar Singh to 21 June 2018, four years after his own book. The later telling is later, and the reading holds. For.

Addendum · The Shape of an Absence

Published 4 September 2026. One of two companion pieces published alongside the series to set out its sourcing. It counted five books. M.L. Fotedar’s The Chinar Leaves is not among them and nothing in that piece refers to it.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The table carries a Peak ÷ avg column beside Peak share. That ratio is confounded by chapter length: it divides chapter density by book average, so an author who writes very long chapters is flattened by the arithmetic however concentrated the subject is. Neerja Chowdhury has the highest peak share in the table at 62.2 per cent and nearly the lowest ratio at 4.37, for no reason except that her chapters average close to 200,000 characters. Future comparisons band on share alone. Against, and it understated the argument the piece was making.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The limitations section lists metonyms as undercounts of her presence, including Natwar Singh uses Mrs Gandhi 28 times and Chowdhury uses Mrs Gandhi 24 times. In both books that form is Indira Gandhi, not Sonia Gandhi. Natwar Singh’s usages sit in the 1966 devaluation, the Kamaraj years, Czechoslovakia in 1968, the negotiation with the princes in 1970. Chowdhury’s sit overwhelmingly in her chapter on Indira Gandhi’s comeback. Adding them would not raise those books’ counts of Sonia Gandhi at all.

The piece’s conclusion, that adding every variant would strengthen Kidwai’s position as the outlier, survives, but not for the reason given. It survives because Kidwai’s metonyms genuinely refer to her while two of the other books’ do not.

And the same paragraph omits a real undercount it should have reported. Sitapati uses Mrs Gandhi twelve times and most of those are Sonia Gandhi, since his chapter on her uses the form throughout. His figure of 159 is the one most understated by string counting, and the piece does not say so. Against, in both directions.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The Chapters with zero column carries the same contamination described under Episode 2 above. Against.

Episode 3 · Two Journeys to Orbassano

Published 12 September 2026

Corrected 3 October 2026. The piece gives her father's name as Stephano in the passage reporting that he preferred Eugenio. The spelling is Stefano. 🚩 It is the only place in the piece where his first name appears, so it is not an inconsistency with a correct instance elsewhere. Every other reference is to Maino alone. Against.

🚩 Open, and flagged rather than corrected. The piece describes Jawid Laiq’s 1977 visit as an interview and quotes her father from it. This project holds that the February 1998 Outlook piece is Laiq recalling that visit rather than an interview with Stefano Maino, and the distinction governs how the material may be used. The piece dates the visit to 1977 and the publication to 1998, which is right. Whether interview overstates what the article is cannot be settled without the article itself. No correction is made until it is.

Episode 4 · The Only Thing She Ever Said

Published 19 September 2026

No corrections to the text. Every checkable claim in this piece has been verified against the sources: Sitapati’s passage on gatekeepers and the line of secretaries from M.O. Mathai to R.K. Dhawan to Vincent George; Natwar Singh’s account of Arjun Singh being refused an audience and admitted only after an intercession; the framing of Jawid Laiq’s 1977 visit and its publication in Outlook in February 1998; and the Italian Eighth Army figures, which the piece correctly states are not evidence about Stefano Maino.

🚩 One item flagged, 3 October 2026, and not corrected. A photograph caption states that Axis prisoners were put to work at Vladimir on post-war reconstruction and local state farms before formal repatriation to Italy. No source has been produced for that, and I have not been able to verify it.

It matters more than a caption usually would. The body of this piece establishes that the captivity appears in only two places and that both trace to one chain, and it says plainly that the general war figures are not evidence about her father. A caption placing Axis prisoners at Vladimir supplies, by implication, the corroboration the article has just withheld. Until a source exists it should be cut back to the architectural facts about the cathedral.

Episode 5 · The Chit at Eight O’Clock

Published 26 September 2026

Corrected 3 October 2026. The phrase in the title is not a quotation from M.L. Fotedar. This piece printed she will be a leader in reserve in italics, attributed to him. A full-text search of his memoir, The Chinar Leaves, returns zero occurrences of it, and zero of she will be required in the future. Both are Neerja Chowdhury’s rendering of her interviews with him and must be attributed to her. Against. It is the episode’s organising phrase.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The chit is not in his book, and his own account of that evening differs. Chowdhury has him sending a written note in through Vincent George without asking to see her. Fotedar’s memoir says he and Arjun Singh went to 10 Janpath and he asked her face to face. The note as a physical object rests on one source. Against.

Corrected 3 October 2026. This piece stated as settled that Arjun Singh proposed her name and Sitaram Kesri seconded it. There are three accounts and they disagree. Fotedar’s memoir says Sharad Pawar proposed her name, after Pranab Mukherjee had proposed Narasimha Rao’s. Mukherjee’s memoir says the Working Committee was unanimous for her, that he announced the decision, and that contrary to some who have written about the period he is not aware of her expressing any view on the succession. Karunakaran, whose discordant note this piece reported, does not appear in Fotedar’s account at all. Against.

Corrected 3 October 2026, and this one runs the other way. The request to delay the refusal by a day is in Fotedar’s own memoir, published 2015, in his own words and with fuller reasoning than the version this piece used: that the news of her election should be reported widely first, that the refusal would then carry greater impact, that it would show she had been the party’s first choice, and that the country would see the act of sacrifice. The central claim is corroborated at origin by the witness himself, eight years before the book this piece relied on. For.

Corrected 3 October 2026, on when he said it. Chowdhury dates her interviews, and every dated interview with Fotedar in her book is from 2005: twelve years before his death and ten before his own memoir. So this is not an account that surfaced only once its witness could not be challenged. But the note for the chit itself gives a place and no date, and his book, which covers that evening in its own chapter, leaves the written note out. Why a man who described it in 2005 omitted it in 2015 is open, and I do not know the answer. Neither for nor against: it exchanges one objection for a better one.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The piece reports that K. Natwar Singh wrote the 1991 sequence twice, in 2013 and again in 2014, and that the two accounts match with nothing added. The sequence, the names and Haksar’s reasoning do match. One thing was added, at the hinge.

On the second consultation, the one that produced Rao’s name, the 2013 book reads that Sonia Gandhi turned to P.N. Haksar, who advised her to send for Rao. The 2014 book reads that he asked her to send for Haksar, who advised her to call Rao. Thirteen months apart, and the teller has placed himself at the decisive moment. That is the pattern this series attributes to him elsewhere, appearing in the very passage offered as evidence that it is absent. Against.

Corrected 3 October 2026, and this one runs the other way. The piece notes that the chit reached print at least six years after its only witness had died. His interviews were not posthumous. Neerja Chowdhury dates her interviews with him, and every dated one is from 2005, twelve years before his death. He gave the account while he could still be challenged, even if he could not review the book. For.

Discharged 3 October 2026. The sourcing note undertook that a cross-examination of Fotedar’s printed memoir against what he told Chowdhury was ongoing and that any divergences would be documented. That has now been done and the divergences are above.

Corrected 3 October 2026. The standfirst refers to a party manager without naming him. He is M.L. Fotedar, and he is also the only source for the claim, so withholding the name concealed that it rests on one man’s account of his own conduct. Against.

Episode 6 · An Hour Later

Published 3 October 2026

No corrections. Five were made to the draft before it went out and are recorded in the working ledger. The published text carries the attributed standfirst, the corrected chronology of the Tiwari Congress and the qualified account of the 100 crore grant. Corrections to the published text, if any, will appear here.

The failure that produced this page

🚩 Two corrections were logged as applied on 25 September and were never applied. The ledger recorded Episodes 1 and 2 as corrected in place with dated notes. Neither note existed. For eight days this series carried a record of having fixed something it had not fixed, which is worse than the original error because it also disabled the check that would have caught it.

That is the argument for this page. A correction that lives only in a working file has not been made. It has been noted.

🚩 The cumulative figure. Earlier pieces gave a running total of corrections in a form that was never reconciled across three different counts. That number is withdrawn and is not restated here. This page carries the entries themselves, dated, which is the thing a running total was standing in for.

This page is updated whenever a published claim changes. The working ledger behind it grades every factual statement in the series and logs every change with the direction it cuts.

K. Natwar Singh records the prime minister of India offering Sonia Gandhi a secure telephone line so that she could reach him whenever she wished. She accepted. An hour later she sent word that she did not want it. The offer, the refusal, and the architecture sitting upstream of both.

In December 1994, P.V. Narasimha Rao asked K. Natwar Singh to come and see him at 5 Race Course Road. Not the office. The house.

Natwar Singh had fallen out with Rao over the running of the party and, on his own account, their relations had been repaired by the time of this meeting.1 He found the prime minister uncharacteristically agitated and restless, which for Rao was itself the news. Stillness was the whole of his public method.

Then the question. You worked closely with her. You must know and should know why Sonia is so hostile to me.

The prime minister of India was asking a former minister to explain the mind of a private citizen.

Natwar Singh answered that his dealings with her were mostly confined to the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust and the Nehru Memorial Fund, and that he seldom discussed politics with her. What he did know was that she was unhappy at the slow pace of the trial of her husband’s assassins.

Rao’s reply was a list. He had sent P. Chidambaram to her with the papers. He had sent the home minister, S.B. Chavan, to brief her. He had gone himself with the files and explained the legal difficulties in hastening the trial. According to him, she listened and said nothing.2

A few days after that conversation the prime minister of India arrived at the house of Mohammad Yunus, an old friend of the Nehru family, after nine at night, without fanfare and without a police escort. Natwar Singh was there. It had been his suggestion. No patch-up followed.

What a RAX line is, and what the offer was

A RAX line is secure government telephony. Offering to install one in a private house is a prime minister proposing to wire that house into the machinery of the state.3

Note the direction, because it is the whole meaning of the scene and it is routinely got backwards. On Natwar Singh’s page, which is the only place any of this exists, the line was not so that Rao could reach her. It was so that she could reach him. The sentence immediately before it in Rao’s complaint is that she never telephones him. He was not asking for access. He was asking to be available.

She said yes, and within the hour she said no.

The architecture that was already there

The refusal only means something against what the relationship had been, and what it had been is better documented than almost anything else in this literature, because Rao kept his papers.

Until 1993, by Vinay Sitapati’s reconstruction from those papers, Rao spoke to Sonia Gandhi on the telephone about twice a week and met her in person about once a week. His secretary R.K. Khandekar would coordinate with her secretary Vincent George, and the prime minister would make the short journey to 10 Janpath.

His son Rajeshwara Rao put it in a sentence that should be read twice. Whether he talked to his own family, they did not know. But every time, he used to talk to Rajiv Gandhi’s family.

The opposition asked the obvious question. Why should a duly elected prime minister brief a private citizen? For two years Rao ignored it.

And in the middle of all this is the detail that tells you what the traffic on that line was actually like. Once in a while, her aide would make the prime minister of India wait on the line for a few minutes. Rao complained about it to his secretary P.V.R.K. Prasad, and the complaint is the most Rao sentence in the corpus.

I do not mind. It is the prime minister who minds.

Sitapati adds, and the hedge is his own and must be carried, that Mrs Gandhi does not appear to have spoken much during these conversations.

She had been refusing things for three years

The grant. Manmohan Singh allocated 100 crore rupees, then a considerable sum, to the newly formed Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. The opposition was livid. Rao cancelled the grant swiftly, but only after Sonia Gandhi had also rejected it. Sitapati’s source for that sequence is an interview with Manmohan Singh himself.

She moved before the prime minister did. She did not move before the noise. A footnote in the same book records that she rejected the donation facing political opposition, which puts the uproar ahead of her refusal and gives this one a cause the other two do not have.

The seat. In October 1991 she refused to contest the Amethi by-election caused by her husband’s death. Sitapati reads that as a signal to Rao’s detractors that she was not about to challenge the prime minister, and the reading is his.

And the one thing she did use. In December 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, she issued a statement condemning it.

That sentence is usually printed exactly as I have just printed it, and it is missing the only part that matters.

So the first political act of her life, as it is usually described, was routed through a charitable trust carrying her husband’s name and the prime minister’s signature at the same time, over objection from inside that trust.

She refused the government’s money. She refused the seat. She kept the institution.

The misstep, which is Sitapati’s finding and not mine

In July 1993 Rao survived his third and final no-confidence motion. The economy was doing well. He felt, finally, in control.

And in mid-1993 he stopped visiting 10 Janpath.

Sitapati’s judgement on why is speculative and he flags it as such: that a man who had bowed before Jawaharlal, Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv, and had never once rebelled, was perhaps beginning to imagine severing the engine from the train.

His judgement on the consequence is not speculative, and it is the most useful sentence in his book about this relationship. It had the opposite effect.

Rao’s absence left his detractors, Arjun Singh, Natwar Singh, M.L. Fotedar, Sheila Dikshit and Vincent George among them, free to complain to her incessantly, while the prime minister had no forum to answer. The journalist Kalyani Shankar, quoted by Sitapati, puts the mechanism plainly: while the two were meeting regularly the middlemen could achieve little, because nobody had to depend on them. Once the meetings stopped, the middlemen created the distance.

Far from excluding her, ending the visits made her an alternative centre of power.

One of the middlemen describes the same plumbing for entirely different reasons. Fotedar writes that she received regular information through Vincent George, and subsequently Natwar Singh, Arjun Singh and occasionally himself. He gives no date. In his book that sentence is a credential. In Sitapati’s argument it is the mechanism, and Fotedar would have rejected the argument.

Through 1994 the traffic increased. Sitapati, citing Arjun Singh’s own autobiography, writes that Arjun Singh sent her letter after letter.

And in December 1994 Rao offered her a telephone.

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The counter, from men who were on the other side

This is where the story would ordinarily end, with a prime minister rebuffed and a widow hardening. The corpus does not permit that ending, and the objection comes from inside the campaign against Rao.

Natwar Singh’s paragraph on the period opens with a sentence that needs no outside corroboration. Our concerted effort to remove P.V. did not succeed, he writes, because he was far cleverer than all of us. He places himself inside the operation, unprompted, in his own book.

Then three things in sequence, of which only the middle one usually gets printed.

That Rao did not have the support of Sonia Gandhi either. That an impression was created by one or two senior Working Committee members that she was unhappy with the reform process and that Rao was ignoring her, and that the attempt was to weaken the hands of Narasimha Rao. And that almost all senior Congressmen knew she was giving Rao the cold shoulder.

So he is not saying the rift was invented. He is saying the estrangement was real and widely known, and that on top of it one or two men built an additional story to damage Rao further. A narrower claim, and worth more for being narrower.

Sitapati named five men who filled the space after the visits stopped. Two of the five have now written about doing it.

Fotedar’s memoir describes planning a breakaway party with N.D. Tiwari and Arjun Singh after the demolition. He went to Vincent George first, then to her directly, and put the idea of splitting the Congress to her. His account of what he got back: though she did not openly support the concept, I got enough indications from her that she would back such a move.

Read the hedge rather than past it. He is not saying she agreed. He is saying he read her. Forty pages later he writes the same event without the hedge, saying she encouraged them. The first version is what he could support. The second is what the story became when he told it again.

A third man belongs here with his limits attached. Pranab Mukherjee’s memoir of these years does not describe the estrangement at all, and his one bearing remark is that she was hardly visible in public at that time and that her withdrawal from high-profile activities continued until 1998.

That is not a witness refuting a historian and should not be used as one. Visibility is not influence. Mukherjee was in government rather than in the traffic at 10 Janpath, and being in the period is not being at the event. He wrote in January 2016 as the sitting President of India, about a party she then led, which is a statement about his position and not about his conduct. He is carried here for what he can carry.

None of this dissolves the estrangement. It means some unknown portion of what reached her about Rao was constructed by men with an interest in her believing it, and that at least one of them was reading approval into her silences.

Which returns us to the telephone. A direct line would have bypassed exactly those men.

Nine months later, Trivandrum

September 1995. The night before she was due at a conference in Trivandrum, the head of security told Natwar Singh that the Babbar Khalsa would make an attempt on her life.

He told A.K. Antony, then chief minister of Kerala, who came to his hotel and asked what they should do. They went to Antony’s house. No police escort. No personal security officer. No sentry at the gate. His staff had gone home at six, and the chief minister of Kerala did not have the prime minister’s telephone number.

Kidwai, writing separately and about something else, describes the same household. As chief minister, Antony lived in a two-bedroom house and both practised and preached austerity, and his wife Elizabeth, a bank employee, saw nothing wrong in taking a city service bus to work every morning. That tells you what kind of household it was. It does not tell you what happened that night.

What it explains is the mechanism. A man with no escort, no security officer and no staff after six has no apparatus around him, and a man with no apparatus has no route into the machine. The bus is not colour. It is the reason the chief minister of a state could not reach the prime minister of India.

Natwar Singh got through. Rao had already heard.

Natwar, you tell her from me that for security reasons, she must not travel to Trivandrum.

Why don’t you tell her, Natwar Singh asked.

It’s better for you to convey my message to her.

There was a credible threat to her life and the prime minister would not make the call.

Her answer, when it was conveyed: she was arriving by the morning flight, because if she did not, she would never be able to stir out of 10 Janpath.

That is not courage. It is a calculation about precedent, and one of the few recorded sentences in which she reasons out loud.

Rao then acted with what Natwar Singh calls alacrity. Commandos were flown in overnight. Raj Bhavan became a fortress.

He would do everything for her except speak to her. Which is, read backwards, exactly what the RAX phone was for.

A note on sourcing

The December 1994 conversation, the RAX phone, the evening at Mohammad Yunus’s house and Trivandrum all rest on K. Natwar Singh alone, in One Life Is Not Enough, Rupa, 2014. They appear nowhere else in the corpus.

He was dropped from government in 2005 over the Volcker findings and wrote from open resentment. Every characterisation of her personality in that book is a dismissed minister’s characterisation. The scenes and dates are checkable; the adjectives are not. Two things cut the other way. These passages are among the least self-serving in the book, and his verified drift is specific: what grows in his retellings is his own agency in causal scenes, and there is no causal claim here for it to grow into.

I searched his earlier book, Walking with Lions (2013), for all of it. None of it is there. Narasimha Rao is named four times in that whole book and the only column about him stops at his appointment in 1991. But it is a collection of newspaper columns, not a continuous memoir, so its silence contradicts nothing. What the check establishes is narrow: the drift test cannot be run on these scenes, because there is only one telling.

The architecture, the 100 crore grant, the Amethi refusal and the mid-1993 withdrawal come from Sitapati’s Half-Lion, reconstructed from Rao’s papers and diary. The reading of what the withdrawal caused is his.

M.L. Fotedar is not a neutral witness. He is one of the men who complained to her once Rao stopped visiting, and his agency grows in retelling: he is the source of the 1991 chit, a scene absent from his own memoir and supplied to Neerja Chowdhury years afterwards. He is used here for two things, the briefing route and the split, and in both he describes his own conduct. 🚩 He does not corroborate Sitapati and must not be read as doing so.

Pranab Mukherjee’s The Turbulent Years was searched and contains none of it. I predicted before reading that this silence would be strong evidence. It is not, and the prediction is printed because it was wrong. A silence equally consistent with nothing happening and with something unwriteable discriminates between neither.

The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation statement is Kidwai’s, single-source, and undated in his text.

The test for November

Everybody opening Belonging on 10 November will look for whether she was hostile to Narasimha Rao. That is the obvious question and the least informative one, because both answers are available and neither is surprising.

Here is the narrower test.

Does she register the visits ending?

Somebody who experienced mid-1993 as abandonment says so, and says when she noticed. Somebody who experienced it as opportunity does not mention it at all, because from inside, nothing happened. A man simply stopped coming.

And the sharper version: does the telephone appear?

It is a small, undignified, entirely human episode. She accepted an offer and withdrew it within the hour, and the man she withdrew it from was wounded enough to tell a third party about it more than a year later. A memoir that includes it is prepared to record a moment in which she was neither gracious nor grieving but simply decisive, and then changed her mind about being decisive, and left somebody hurt.

A memoir that leaves it out has still told us something, because Rao’s version is already in print and hers is not.

Next week: the house she inherited, and the wicket gate that made two power centres a matter of floor plan before it was ever a matter of politics.

This series keeps a graded claim ledger behind it. Every correction to a published piece is listed and dated on the corrections page, including the ones that run in my favour.

दिए गए सोर्स 1990 के दशक के बीच भारत के पूर्व प्रधानमंत्री पी.वी. नरसिम्हा राव और सोनिया गांधी के बीच बिगड़े रिश्तों की पड़ताल करते हैं और बताते हैं कि कैसे राजनीतिक बिचौलियों ने उनके बीच की दूरियों को और बढ़ा दिया। संस्मरणों और ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषणों से पता चलता है कि राव ने आखिरकार उनके घर जाना बंद कर दिया, जिससे अनजाने में ही उनके राजनीतिक विरोधियों को उनके बारे में सोनिया गांधी की सोच को प्रभावित करने का मौका मिल गया। कुछ अहम घटनाएं, जैसे राव द्वारा दी गई सुरक्षित टेलीफोन लाइन को गांधी का अचानक ठुकरा देना और सुरक्षा खतरों पर उनका कड़ा रुख, आपसी अविश्वास और राजनीतिक तनाव वाले रिश्तों को उजागर करती हैं। इसके अलावा, ये लेख उस दौर के नेताओं के अलग-अलग संस्मरणों और बयानों की विश्वसनीयता की भी जांच करते हैं, जिससे कांग्रेस पार्टी के पर्दे के पीछे की सत्ता और बातचीत के तौर-तरीकों की गहरी समझ मिलती है।

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यह ब्रीफिंग डॉक्यूमेंट 1990 के दशक के मध्य में प्रधानमंत्री पी.वी. नरसिम्हा राव और सोनिया गांधी के बीच राजनीतिक रिश्ते, बातचीत के तरीकों और आखिरकार उनके बीच आई दूरियों का विश्लेषण करता है। यह डॉक्यूमेंट मुख्य रूप से यादों और ऐतिहासिक घटनाओं के ब्योरों—खासकर के. नटवर सिंह, विनय सीतापति, एम.एल. फोटेदार और रशीद किदवई के बयानों—पर आधारित है। इसमें यह बताया गया है कि कैसे शुरू में कामकाज के तौर-तरीके गहरे अविश्वास में बदल गए, जिससे 10 जनपथ पर सत्ता का एक वैकल्पिक केंद्र बना और आखिरकार इंडियन नेशनल कांग्रेस के भीतर बड़े राजनीतिक बदलाव हुए।

मुख्य बातें इस प्रकार हैं:

* बातचीत का टूटना: एक ऐसा रिश्ता जो हर दो हफ़्ते में फ़ोन कॉल और हर हफ़्ते आमने-सामने की मुलाकातों से शुरू हुआ था, वह 1993 के मध्य में प्रधानमंत्री राव के 10 जनपथ जाना बंद करने के बाद धीरे-धीरे खत्म हो गया।

* RAX टेलीफ़ोन का मामला: राव ने सोनिया गांधी के निजी घर पर एक सुरक्षित सरकारी टेलीफ़ोन (RAX लाइन) लगाने का प्रस्ताव दिया—ताकि वह सीधे उनसे बात कर सकें—जिसे पहले तो स्वीकार कर लिया गया, लेकिन एक घंटे के भीतर ही ठुकरा दिया गया। राव ने इस घटना को “मेरे चेहरे पर तमाचा” बताया।

* बिचौलियों द्वारा फ़ायदा उठाना: राव के पीछे हटने से कामकाज में जो खालीपन आया, उसका फ़ायदा उठाकर पार्टी के अंदर के आलोचकों (जिनमें अर्जुन सिंह, एम.एल. फोटेदार, के. नटवर सिंह, शीला दीक्षित और विंसेंट जॉर्ज शामिल थे) ने सोनिया गांधी को प्रभावित किया और ऐसी बातें फैलाईं जिनसे राव की छवि को नुकसान पहुँचा।

* सरकारी सत्ता बनाम दूरी का विरोधाभास: सुरक्षा के लिए गंभीर खतरों के समय भी—जैसे सितंबर 1995 में बब्बर खालसा द्वारा हत्या की साज़िश—राव ने सोनिया गांधी से सीधे बात करने से इनकार कर दिया। इसके बजाय, उन्होंने सुरक्षा से जुड़े ज़रूरी निर्देश तीसरे पक्ष के ज़रिए भेजने का फ़ैसला किया, जबकि साथ ही ज़्यादा से ज़्यादा सरकारी सुरक्षा कमांडो भी तैनात किए।

और जानने के लिए पॉडकास्ट सुनें।

These are standalone pieces, but together they reveal something larger: the process of thinking, questioning, verifying and interpreting that has gone into preparing this series on Sonia Gandhi’s forthcoming memoir, Belonging. In that sense, they are not only about Sonia Gandhi or about one political autobiography. They are also lessons in how political memoirs should be read, with curiosity but without credulity, with sympathy but without surrendering scepticism, and with the instincts of both a participant in politics and a journalist examining the evidence. Through Belonging as a case study, I hope to explore how memories are constructed, how sources should be tested against one another, how omissions can matter as much as revelations, and how personal recollection interacts with the historical record. And somewhere within this exercise lies a second purpose: to develop a practical method for anyone who wishes to read political memoirs more intelligently: or, one day, to write one with greater honesty, discipline and regard for evidence.

Why a set at all

A single book on a contested relationship gives you that author’s judgement and no way to test it. Reading three gives you a way to test it only if the three fail differently. Three memoirs by three insiders would be three versions of the same kind of unreliability, and their agreement would prove nothing.

So the set is not chosen for coverage. It is chosen for the variety of its failure modes.

The criteria

Different evidentiary types. One participant working from memory, one biographer working from papers, one journalist working from interviews. Each has access the others structurally lack, and each breaks in a way the others do not.

Different distances from the subject. Inside the room, inside the archive, outside with a notebook.

A spread of publication dates. The set runs 2014 to 2023. That decade is what makes it possible to watch a claim harden, travel between books, or get quietly dropped. A set published in one year would be useless for that.

Overlapping coverage of one narrow window. All three treat 1991 to 1996 and the same two principals at length. Without overlap there is nothing to compare.

Traceable sourcing. All three attach routes to their claims, by footnote, endnote or in the prose. A book that asserts without sourcing cannot be placed in a chain, and so cannot be graded.

K. Natwar Singh, One Life Is Not Enough (2014)

Type: participant memoir.

How it fails. It is memory, written twenty years after the events, by a man reconstructing conversations he did not record at the time.

The bias that has to be declared. Natwar Singh was named in the Volcker report in October 2005, gave up the External Affairs portfolio, resigned in December, and eventually left the Congress. This book followed in 2014, and its chapter on Sonia Gandhi was the reason it sold. She responded to it publicly. So the single source for the most quoted material in the set is a man writing after a public rupture with one of the two people he is describing, in a book marketed on that rupture.

That does not make any of it false. He was demonstrably present. It means the anecdotes carry a motive as well as a source, and a piece that does not say so first will be corrected by any reader who remembers 2005.

Vinay Sitapati, Half Lion (2016)

Type: biography with archival access.

How it fails. It is a biography, so it has a subject and a thesis, and the material arrives arranged to serve them. It reproduces Natwar at length, which means much of what looks like a second source is not. And its arrangement moves things: Natwar’s December 1994 conversation sits inside a paragraph that opens in May 1995.

Worth noting in its favour. Where it copies, it cites. The footnote leads to Natwar’s pages. That is what an honest chain looks like, and it is the reason you were able to trace it at all.

Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide (2023)

Type: journalist’s reconstruction from long-running interviews.

How it fails. The Rao chapter is one of several in a book about decisions, so the period is treated at less length than in the other two. And she is downstream of Sitapati in at least one place: the 2004 hospital scene comes with an endnote citing Half Lion.

Worth noting. Her habit of dating and naming interviews is what makes the set gradeable. Without it one cannot tell route independence from origin independence anywhere.

Why three, and why this window

Three is the smallest number that gives you one of each type. Drop any one and something specific goes with it: the private conversations, the documents, or the dated attributions.

The window runs from May 1991 to roughly 1996 because that is the span in which the relationship between the two principals is both consequential and undocumented in the ordinary way. Neither held the other’s office. Nothing between them was minuted. Sonia Gandhi held no post at all until 1997, so there is no party record of her actions. Everything we can know about the period therefore arrives as somebody’s testimony, which is exactly the condition under which a set of differently-failing books is worth more than any one of them.

What the set cannot do

It has almost no contemporaneous base. Apart from Sitapati’s archive finds, everything is retrospective. The contemporary reporting doing the real work in your pieces, the India Today issues of January and February 1995 and the UPI dispatch from Amethi, comes from outside the set.

The consequence, which is worth stating in any piece built on this material: almost every claim here grades one or two. One mouth, sometimes several routes. That is not a failure of the books. It is the shape of the evidence for a relationship that nobody was required to record.

What would extend it

A named participant with his own route into an existing scene. Mani Shankar Aiyar takes the five in the morning call on 2 December 1992 and has published memoirs. If his account exists and is worded differently, you gain a second mouth on an episode currently held only through Chowdhury’s inference.

Documents. The Verma and Jain commission records speak directly to the grievance that drove the estrangement, and they are records rather than recollections.

The other side of the room. Rasheed Kidwai’s work on Sonia Gandhi, already in the house for the Babri material, is the nearest available thing. It will not be independent of Rao’s circle in every respect, but it is not written from inside it.

Her own account. Belonging is out in November 2026. It is the first prospect of a first-person route from the other principal, and it will be worth re-grading the whole ledger against it.