Victim Card

There is something almost literary about the Congress’s reaction to Sonia Gandhi’s memoir not being published in India by Penguin Random House. The episode follows a familiar script. Each time something happens where the facts are inconvenient for the Congress and its controlling dynasty, the party brass discovers a villain in Narendra Modi and the ruling BJP.

Sonia Gandhi’s Belonging: A Journey of Love is scheduled for international release next month through Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House India, however, has clarified that it is not the Indian publisher of the memoir. It has also explained that its fact-checking and editorial recommendations were part of the ordinary publishing process that kept them from publishing the memoir. It has further clarified by stating that it remained “willing and keen” to publish the book.

Instead of ending the drama, the clarification has become an invitation to manufacture one. Congress leaders, and elements in their media ecosystem, lost no time in insinuating that Penguin was pressured by the BJP either to abandon the book or demand changes.

This leap on part of the Congress, from editorial scrutiny to political intimidation, is breathtaking indeed. It requires the public to believe that fact-checking is suspicious when it involves Sonia Gandhi, but presumably respectable when it involves everyone else.

Publishing houses fact-check manuscripts and protect themselves, their authors and, not least, their credibility. That is how the process operates.

Indeed, Penguin has said precisely the opposite of what the Congress alleges, that it was interested in publishing the memoir. The disagreement, as described by the publisher, concerned the fact-checking process and recommendations made to the author.  Yet the Congress appears constitutionally incapable of resisting the seduction of persecution.

It seems perpetuating a political culture that transforms disagreement into a sinister conspiracy and a legitimate institutional process into an assault on democracy.

There is an irony here that should not be lost. A memoir, by definition, is an intensely personal reconstruction of political life. It is also a historical document, especially when its author has occupied the centre of recent Indian political power for some time now. Such a book deserves rigorous scrutiny precisely because its claims will enter the public record.

If the Congress believes Penguin has suppressed the memoir under government pressure, it should produce evidence. If it cannot, then this episode is less about censorship than about something the party has perfected over the years: the politics of permanent victimhood.

The curious thing is that Sonia Gandhi’s memoir has hardly been ‘silenced.’ It is still coming out under a no less prestigious imprimatur. The only thing that appears to have been cancelled is the Congress’s opportunity to resist turning itself into the victim.