NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi has joined Instagram, and her very first post is about her book. On Thursday, the Congress leader shared a video with the first look of her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love. The book has been in the news since its original publisher, Penguin Random House India, decided not to go ahead with it.
In the video, Gandhi is sitting in a library, flipping through the book and stopping at the photographs. Her daughter, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, is next to her. At one point the two hug, and Gandhi mentions how many pictures the book has.
“Hello everyone, I’m truly grateful to share this moment with you all,” she wrote. She described the book as a story of love, duty, loss and finding a place to belong.
Her follower count began rising within hours of the post. For now, she follows only three accounts: her son Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka and the Congress party.
Rahul, who is the MP from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, has 16.3 million followers on Instagram. Priyanka has 2.9 million, and the Congress page has 15.9 million, slightly below Rahul. Sonia is still not on X or Facebook, though both her children are. Rahul has 28.6 million followers on X and 15 million on Facebook. Priyanka, the MP from Wayanad in Kerala, has 5.9 million and 5.5 million on the same platforms.
Gandhi is a Rajya Sabha MP and chairs the Congress Parliamentary Party. She turns 80 in December and has mostly stayed off social media during her political career. Her entry comes when social media matters more than ever for reaching young voters, as the recent youth-led protests in Delhi showed.
The row over the book
The controversy began in September, when Penguin Random House India said it would not publish the memoir. The two sides could not agree on editorial changes and deletions.
The Indian Express had reported that the disputed passages allegedly referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the RSS, the Galwan standoff with China, communal tensions and the condition of minorities. According to sources, Penguin wanted changes in one part of the manuscript, and the author refused.
Senior Congress leaders alleged that the publisher was pressured to remove portions about Modi, the RSS and China’s occupation of Indian territory during Modi’s rule.
Penguin did not accept that version. It said fact-checking and editorial suggestions are part of a publisher’s job, and that the account of its decision did not reflect what actually happened.
About a week after the row, HarperCollins India took over the deal. It announced that the memoir will be released on November 10, 2026. The publisher called it “one of the most anticipated political memoirs of our time,” and said it offers a rare insider’s view of India’s journey.
