Coorg’s avocado curries, her father’s plantation visit and Ballari’s politics in Sonia Gandhi’s Belonging

From Amie aunty’s stories of Coorg and her father’s visit to an arecanut plantation to her own electoral contest in Ballari, Sonia Gandhi’s Belonging: A Journey of Love traces the many ways Karnataka became part of her family’s story and political journey

Published - November 14, 2026 06:01 am IST - Bengaluru

Late Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife, Sonia Gandhi, going around a ‘goshala’ at Majjur village in Shirahatti taluk of Dharwad district in April 1986. | Photo Credit: HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVES

Late Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife, Sonia Gandhi, inaugurating the drinking water supply scheme at Challakere village in Chitradurga district of Karnataka on April 12, 1986. | Photo Credit: HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVES

An arecanut plantation in Karnataka was among the places that caught the interest of Sonia Gandhi’s father, Stefano Maino, during his visits to India. Alongside a power project in Keralam and a factory in Maharashtra, it was one of the places he chose to see beyond the usual tourist circuit, writes Sonia Gandhi in her recently released memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, remembering her father as a formidable patriarch, “loved, respected, feared” within the family.

From her father’s visits to India and the memories of people who became part of her family life to the electoral contests in which she and her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, were involved, Karnataka finds mention in different parts of the memoir.

Another person from Karnataka who figures in Sonia Gandhi’s memories of the people who made the Gandhi household feel like home was Amie Crishna, who hailed from Coorg and served as one of Indira Gandhi’s personal secretaries. Amie aunty, as Sonia Gandhi came to call her, had known Indira Gandhi since her early days at Teen Murti House.

The two would go to the “bazar” together to look for things Indira Gandhi needed. Amie, Sonia Gandhi writes, would also tell her about Coorg, its people and their valour, and its food, including “curries made with the avocados that grew wild there”. She writes of how fond she grew of Amie aunty, whom she describes as “a sunny, loving and lovable human being” and a “trusted elder aunt”.

The State also figures in the electoral journeys of both Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi.

Sonia Gandhi recalls how the coffee-growing constituency of Chikkamagaluru gave her mother-in-law a route back to Parliament in November 1978, after her defeat in Rae Bareli in the 1977 Lok Sabha election in the aftermath of the Emergency. As she notes, Chikkamagaluru was among the southern constituencies that continued to support her mother-in-law even as much of the North had turned against her. Indira Gandhi won the byelection comfortably and returned to the Lok Sabha.

Karnataka also became the setting for Sonia Gandhi’s own electoral debut. In 1999, she contested from Amethi, the constituency represented by Rajiv Gandhi. Her senior Congress colleagues, however, urged her to enter the fray from a southern constituency as well, amid apprehensions that the BJP might find a way to keep her out of Parliament by getting the Amethi election countermanded. What she describes as a “cat-and-mouse game” brought her to Ballari.

The BJP and the RSS, on learning of the plan, chose Sushma Swaraj to take her on. Their calculation, Sonia Gandhi writes, was that Ms. Swaraj would keep her occupied in Ballari, even if she did not win, leaving her with less time to campaign in Amethi and elsewhere in the country. Ms. Swaraj, she writes, also added a local touch and soon began picking up Kannada phrases and framed the contest as one between the “desi beti” and the “videshi bahu”.

The memoir also recounts how Sonia Gandhi, then relatively new to electoral politics, was unfamiliar with Ballari. Her daughter, Priyanka Gandhi, accompanied her when she filed her nominations in both constituencies and joined her on the campaign trail in Ballari.

Sonia Gandhi travelled through Ballari’s “dry and rocky” landscape with local party leaders and stayed at the partially built house of a Congress supporter. His wife, she writes, “would pop up periodically, smilingly offering a plate laden with freshly made tidbits that I felt compelled to accept, even if I wasn’t hungry.”

The election result, Sonia Gandhi said, surprised her. She won both the Ballari and Amethi constituencies, but had to choose one of the two seats. As she writes, “Inevitably, I chose Amethi.”

Published - November 14, 2026 06:01 am IST

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