Sonia Gandhi's memoir says she's had no real contact with Modi in 12 years

In Belonging, out now, the Congress veteran writes that she has had “practically no real contact” with Narendra Modi across the 12 years he has led India. When the two end up in the same room, she says, Modi “tends to look away, avoiding eye contact” — though he has occasionally asked about her health after a hospital stay. She frames it as a break from an older politics: after the 2001 attack on parliament, she rang then-prime minister AB Vajpayee straight away to check on him, a gesture he appreciated.

Gandhi's read on the current style of power is bleak. She describes a politics where those in office seek to “belittle and torment” opponents, and notes her son Rahul has spent years being mocked by the BJP as “Pappu.” She adds that similar tactics are surfacing elsewhere in the world, an observation the Guardian reads alongside Donald Trump's habit of insulting rivals. The memoir also touches her family's darkest chapters: the loss of her first child shortly after birth, grenades discovered in a room of their house after Operation Blue Star in 1984, and the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

On the press, Gandhi draws a hard line between then and now. She recalls an era when journalists could question prime ministers directly; in 12 years, Modi has not held a single press conference of his own, sitting in on one briefing at the end of an election campaign and taking questions abroad alongside US presidents. Otherwise his media contact has been one-on-one interviews with sympathetic anchors — and one much-publicised chat with a Bollywood actor about how he likes his mangoes.

The book's path to shelves is a story in itself. Penguin Random House India withdrew from the project in August; Gandhi told the Guardian the publisher was “uneasy in general with the criticism of the government” and dropped it after she refused suggested edits. Penguin disputes that account, saying the suggestion it pulled out over refused editorial changes “does not accurately reflect the circumstances.” Alfred A Knopf released it in the US, and HarperCollins is publishing in India. Penguin had also backed out of distributing Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot, about the 2013 Muzaffarnagar violence, citing a map and citation problems — Sacco blamed the “current political climate in India.”

Where Western political memoirs swing, Gandhi stays measured. She writes warmly about the closeness between the Gandhis and Amitabh Bachchan's family — she lived with his parents when she first arrived in India — but says nothing about the later estrangement. Nor does she name the leader she calls “thoroughly dishonest,” the one she trusted in 1999 when Congress tried and failed to form a coalition. She does revisit the Emergency her mother-in-law imposed in June 1975 — 21 months of suspended civil liberties, jailed opponents and a gagged press — and says it split the family too. Along the way she describes Indira as besieged and profoundly alone in the months before that declaration, and recalls a 2012 conversation with Hillary Clinton about the loneliness that comes with power for India's women leaders.