The beatification of Sonia Gandhi

THE RED SARI: A DRAMATISED BIOGRAPHY OF SONIA GANDHI
Javier Moro
Roli Books, 2015;
440 pages; Rs 395

It is, of course, a well-known fact that nobody ever actually reads the books by which they wish to be outraged. We live in an age of outrage, in which mobs, the law and the courts can be mobilised to prevent the release of just about any act of creativity. Still, there have been few examples of the complete and utter pointlessness of this approach, the colossal stupidity that undergirds this mechanism of suppression, as the long fracas that surrounded The Red Sari, by Javier Moro.

The Red Sari is a "dramatised biography" of Sonia Gandhi. It has, at long last, been released - many years after legal threats from the Congress first kept it from our shelves. Naturally, now that it's been permitted into bookshops, they can barely keep it in stock. Clearly, the fascination with the Gandhi family is intact, whether or not the Congress itself is over as a political force.

The book has been helped along by being the lightest possible confection, a sugary version of recent history that skims over real awkwardness to focus on melodrama and romance. This is, of course, how Indians like to consume their history: with a hefty dose of imagination. This is the school of writing that, when I was in school, turned such books as Freedom at Midnight into bestsellers, sold at every street corner. It is not really that surprising that Mr Moro's book falls squarely into this tradition - he is, in fact, Dominique Lapierre's nephew. It is this that permitted him to once come face-to-face with Sonia Gandhi, at a Rashtrapati Bhavan reception for Mr Lapierre. The way that Mr Moro tells it, when he mentioned to Sonia Gandhi that he was writing a book about her, the Congress president, said, haughtily: "We never read what is written about us." To anyone who has followed the extraordinary collapse of the Congress, these words will not come as a surprise.

It is a pity the Congress never read the book before intimidating the publisher into silence. If they had, they would instead have subsidised the printing of a million copies, and had it translated into every conceivable Indian language, their answer to Bal Narendra.

The picture Mr Moro draws of Sonia Gandhi is painfully saint-like; the humble origins transcended, the blissful but conformist romance, the great tragedy nobly borne, the awesome responsibility bravely shouldered, and at last the glorious success. No work of propaganda could have been quite as successful at perpetuating the Sonia myth.

Mr Moro himself claims that he merely humanises her, not respecting her aloof legend as the Congress would prefer. Perhaps. But, certainly, this is not a journalist's book. It asks no questions of Sonia Gandhi's career, or of her husband's record. The riots of 1984 were not his fault; he even supported and toppled Chandra Shekhar in good faith.

And in a country in which it is impossible to even mildly suggest the Gandhis are not in fact neck-deep in awful corruption without being told you are their paid agent, Mr Moro not just makes a case for their innocence in Bofors and other such scandals - but even repeats a story that Sonia Gandhi's father died angry with her, supposedly because the Congress government deliberately avoided signing contracts with Italian companies, including Stefano Maino's Fiat.

Actually, the Italy bits are the best bits. You get the sense that here, at least, Mr Moro is on relatively familiar ground, describing how Sonia Gandhi's family, the Mainos, were outsiders in Turin, being paesani from the countryside; the sisters were, he claims, mocked at school for their dowdy clothes. Sonia Gandhi, Mr Moro says, learnt both Russian and French as a girl, well enough to act as an interpreter for commercial travellers; one wonders if this is true, and how much of those languages she remembered into the 1980s and beyond.

The meat of the book, the middle half, is the story of Sonia Gandhi's marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, her move to India, and her effective adoption by Indira Gandhi as her favourite. All of it is written with an eye to maximum heart-string-tugging. For example, after the description of a documentary being shown to the Gandhi family by Gita Mehta about the devastation in East Pakistan, we are told: "When it was over, Sonia saw that Indira was crying."

One or two of these supposed anecdotes are genuinely moving, and I'd love to know if they actually happened. This one, for example: according to Mr Moro, as Sonia Gandhi flew back from Madras on May 22, 1991, with a coffin containing her husband's remains - as well as one with those of his bodyguard - as soon as "she realised that the coffin of Pradip Gupta had nothing on it, she placed a garland of jasmine there, too".

Mr Moro has been open about his "sources" - Pupul Jayakar, for example; Sonia Gandhi's father's best friend; Indira Gandhi's private secretary Usha Bhagat; and so on. It's mildly amusing to see Mani Shankar Aiyar listed - one wonders if the old loyalist suffered any blowback for collaborating with the author.

Overall, The Red Sari is written like a competent historical novel; one turns the pages easily, and it never lags, although there is little compulsion to keep reading. Mr Moro makes little effort to hide his very old-style European puzzlement at a woman choosing to make her home in India, and his equally European sympathy for her social-democratic politics. (He even implies Sonia Gandhi is an atheist.)

It is an iron rule of such paperback romances that the heroine must be an utterly sympathetic figure, and the Sonia Gandhi of The Red Sari has almost no flaws. ("Loves too much", perhaps.) Again, it is inexplicable that this book was banned. Perhaps the Congress just wanted to ensure that everyone would eventually read it. And I suspect as many will as have read Bal Narendra.