In Interview, Sonia Gandhi Recalls Love and Loss in India

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Sonia Gandhi Married Into a Political Dynasty and Then Lived Through Tragedy

In a memoir and interview, the Italian-born woman who married into the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty recalls political battles and the killings of family members.

Sonia Gandhi standing in front of the desk of her late husband and the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at their residence in New Delhi in November.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times

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· 11:54 min

By Elisabeth Bumiller

Elisabeth Bumiller, the author of a book on the women of India, reported from New Delhi.

Nov. 10, 2026

The astonishing story of Sonia Gandhi, the young woman from a middle-class Italian family who married into the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, lived through unspeakable tragedy and nearly became prime minister of India, reached a crescendo in May 2004 in her heavily fortified home in New Delhi.

“It took place in this very room,” she said in an interview last week in her home office, once that of her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi.

His tricolor Congress Party shawl still hung over his desk chair in the corner, where it has been since his assassination in 1991, when he was campaigning to be prime minister a second time. On the wall was a photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv’s grandfather and India’s first prime minister, and another of Rajiv’s mother, Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated as prime minister less than seven years before her son.

On that day in 2004, party elders beseeched Sonia Gandhi, criticized by the opposition as a foreign-born interloper, to take her place as prime minister as the leader of the Congress Party, which had just won national elections. She initially said yes, horrifying her two children, Rahul and Priyanka, but recanted.

“My brother and I actually thought that she would get killed, too,” said Priyanka Gandhi, who sat next to her mother in the interview.

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