Following Penguin’s withdrawal, Sonia Gandhi’s memoir has found a new publisher
The book is to be published by HarperCollins. The leader of the opposition had refused to remove politically controversial passages about Prime Minister Narendra Modi
from our correspondent Marco Masciaga
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NEW DELHI – HarperCollins India has announced that it will be the Indian publisher of “Belonging”, the eagerly awaited memoir by Sonia Gandhi, one of the leading figures in India’s main opposition party. A week ago, what was to have been the original publisher, Penguin Random House India, announced that it had pulled out of publishing one of the most eagerly awaited books of the year in the subcontinent’s vast and vibrant publishing market.
According to reports in numerous Indian media outlets, Penguin’s decision to backtrack is said to be linked to certain passages in the book in which Gandhi discusses Prime Minister Narendra Modi; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing Hindu organisation from which Modi hails; and the clashes between India and China in 2020–21 along the disputed border between the two countries.
“The insinuations” that the failure to publish was due to “the author’s refusal to make editorial changes do not accurately reflect the circumstances”, reads a statement from Penguin Random House India. “As publishers, it is our responsibility to carry out fact-checking and to advise authors in the best interests of their books.”
According to sources cited by the newspaper The Hindu, when asked to remove certain passages from the book, Gandhi reportedly replied that it was the story of her life and that she would not alter anything in the text, because any form of self-censorship would have interfered with the narrative process.
Penguin Random House India is no stranger to backtracking of this sort: this year it was due to publish the memoir by former army chief Manoj Makund Naravane, but it seems that – once again – the account of the clashes on the border with China has halted its release. The same fate befell The Once and Future Riot, a graphic novel by Joe Sacco about the clashes between Hindus and Muslims that took place in 2013 in Muzaffarnagar, in Uttar Pradesh, which was apparently blocked due to the inclusion of a map of India that differed from the official one issued by the New Delhi government.
