To spend nearly 60 years making a home in a nation that continuously measures your weight in bloodlines or lineage is not just a political struggle; it is a profound personal and human tragedy.<\/p>\n
Unwittingly perhaps, Sonia Gandhi<\/a> zeroed in on a title for her memoir, Belonging<\/i>, a word that in the context of her life in India carries a bruised, melancholic weight.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s India, more than ever before, \u201cbelonging\u201d is rarely a simple, settled state of existence. Instead, it is a daily examination, an unceasing trial of allegiance and loyalty, imposed repeatedly by a majoritarian ethos that now reserves the right to declare who is truly an insider, and who sadly will remain an eternal outsider.<\/p>\n Her book may, over the forthcoming weeks and months, keep disappearing in lakhs from bookstores and e-commerce sites, partly as evidence of standing with her but also out of curiosity.<\/p>\n Yet, significant sections of Indians will continue confining her in the defendant\u2019s box, in a relentless ideologically charged national trial.<\/p>\n The \u201cprosecution\u201d in this minute-by-minute hearing will not consider four decades of shared tragedy stemming from the ferocious public murders that took away her most loved ones, devotion to the land, commitment to core national values, pursuit of the dream shared by the nation\u2019s founding figures, nor, of course, her legally acquired citizenship.<\/p>\n All experiences she has lived, and her faithfulness, which must be constantly articulated, will continue being dismissed by a majoritarian reflex that views Sonia Gandhi as an inassimilable alien, or eternal guest whose invitation can be revoked at will.<\/p>\n Undeniably a political being for almost three decades, from 1997 in fact, Gandhi did not enter India as a political aspirant, but as a young woman led by love into a family that would soon be shattered by repeated, violent political assassinations and that possibly remains unsure of the path its members, including her, have chosen to pursue.<\/p>\n No one can deny that Gandhi absorbed the nation\u2019s joys and griefs, learned its languages, wore its handlooms, and cremated a mother-in-law and the shattered remnants of her husband on its soil. Yet, when she sat down to write about a life that only a few within her close circle knew about, she was still haunted by the sense of \u201cbelonging\u201d.<\/p>\n By sharing her own narrative of naturalisation and emotional ties, Gandhi inadvertently reopens one of the central anomalies of modern Indian nationhood: the continued mistrust or wariness of public institutions, officials, parties, or politically antagonistic fellow citizens.<\/p>\n Looking back at the nearly six decades of her living on Indian soil illustrates the forked tongue of significant sections of the political elite, who have enlisted a core social constituency by harnessing majoritarian-speak.<\/p>\n Although the hegemons ensconced in the nation\u2019s corridors of power swear by the Constitution, legal citizenship granted officially to naturalised Indians does not ensure cultural or political belonging for all. What, however, is guaranteed is an undercurrent of selective xenophobia, which continues to evaluate individuals, not by their constitutional standing, but by their origin, bloodline, faith, and political standpoint. Gandhi remains possibly at the head of this line under verbal fire.<\/p>\n Her situation, as regrettably manifest in her memoir\u2019s title, highlights India\u2019s officially backed hypocrisy. India and Indians have for decades celebrated the success or victory of every member of their diaspora overseas. In fact, we have a Prime Minister in Narendra Modi who has made it a virtue of addressing and mobilising the diaspora as a global Hindu community with indelible links to India.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, the government announced that the 19th edition of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas Convention will be held in Kolkata from January 7-9, 2027, with the theme \u201cReturn to Roots: Reigniting the Diaspora Connect with Bharat\u201d.<\/p>\n This outreach to the pravasi<\/i> Indian is a constant one-way narrative, and it is commonplace to see TV cameras focussing on spectators waving the Indian tricolour and cheering for Indian sports teams on foreign soil.<\/p>\n Indians abroad are also sought out to lobby for the government at home and its geopolitical interests, with the expectation that neither the adopted country nor its other citizens are to be offended by this show of loyalty. Alongside, it is expected that foreign governments and peoples should embrace the (Hindu) Indian-origin emigrant as their own.<\/p>\n Consider for a moment the country of Gandhi\u2019s birth hosting a mirroring event, and she choosing to attend. Immediately, her loyalty to India will be doubted, and verbal firecrackers, paralleling the tens of millions that were just burst on Diwali across India, will be ignited.<\/p>\n As seen in the repeated discourse erupting against Gandhi, most intensely in 2004, when many believed she would take up the Prime Ministership, such selective promotion of hostile, uncompromising distrust for people born outside India while cheering the \u201cIndian\u201d loyalties of the NRI is constantly justified, despite Gandhi having passed every scrutiny of citizenship.<\/p>\n In response to criticism of their hostile campaign against Gandhi, the BJP\u2019s defenders claimed that their opposition was over the question of naturalised citizens of foreign origin holding top constitutional posts. This argument, however, is legally and constitutionally unsound. In a modern democratic nation, there cannot be two categories of citizens.<\/p>\n \n Copies of India’s Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging<\/i> are displayed in a bookstore in New Delhi on November 10, 2026. In practice, however, there are. For instance, the actor Akshay Kumar, even before he regained Indian citizenship in 2023, was granted high-profile access to Prime Minister Narendra Modi (including the widely publicised 2019 \u201cmango-eating\u201d interview) and was celebrated as a symbol of Indian nationalism, a privilege never granted to Gandhi.<\/p>\n From the beginning of her career, Gandhi\u2019s place of birth has been repeatedly weaponised and flagged as a permanent disqualification. It cannot be forgotten that a split in the Congress after she entered politics led to the formation of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in 1999. It came into being over the explicit demand that a foreign-born citizen be constitutionally barred from holding the offices of President, Vice President, and Prime Minister. Among the multiple ironies dogging Indian public life, the NCP was a key constituent in the Congress-led government at the Centre from 2004 to 2014.<\/p>\n The doublespeak on the Indian diaspora versus foreign-born Indian citizens exposes a schism that was always prevalent but has deepened since 2014. This is the divide between India\u2019s constitutional founding principles and the prevailing politics of cultural nationalism or Hindutva, which is virtually on its way to being elevated as the nation\u2019s official credo.<\/p>\n Much before Gandhi chose to enter politics to underscore her commitment to core Indian values and its constitutional principles, the majoritarian impulse to demand proof of allegiance was always directed with equal intensity, if not more, against certain categories of native-born Indian citizens, most visibly Muslims (and Christians).<\/p>\n Indian Muslims<\/a> were (and are) routinely subjected to tests of national loyalty in which stray incidents, make-believe or very rarely factual, are projected on the entire community, all of them labelled disloyal, pro-Pakistan, or fifth columnists.<\/p>\n For decades, sporting events\u2014specifically India-Pakistan<\/a> cricket and hockey matches\u2014served as kangaroo courts to test allegiance. A cheer for a rival team or a perceived lack of enthusiasm for an Indian victory, by a group or an individual, even if for sporting reasons, was frequently seized upon to question the integrity of the entire community.<\/p>\n Over time, societal suspicion has metamorphosed into state policy. It did not take much, especially after 2014, to make \u201cGo to Pakistan\u201d the routine barb used by even those holding constitutional positions.<\/p>\n The legislative culmination of this reasoning took the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. For the first time in Indian history, the issue of citizenship for refugees from subcontinental neighbouring countries was linked to their religious identity. Refuge-seekers from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who entered India on or before December 31, 2014, can now be granted Indian citizenship if they are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, or Christian.<\/p>\n It is a tragedy that Sonia Gandhi\u2019s Belonging<\/i> mirrors the republic struggling with its own soul. For India to celebrate its global diaspora\u2019s dual loyalties while policing its own naturalised citizens and minorities betrays its constitutional promise. And its government\u2019s hypocrisy.<\/p>\n But this is how Indian citizenship has been inverted from an equal constitutional right into a conditional privilege filtered by a political hegemon, to provide the majority with a sense of power over the \u201cother\u201d.<\/p>\n Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is an author and journalist based in Delhi-NCR. His latest book is<\/i> The Demolition, The Verdict and The Temple: The Definitive Book on the Ram Mandir Project. He is also the author of<\/i> Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.<\/p>\n Also Read | INDIA needs Sonia Gandhi<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Also Read | Reading at risk<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nTwo kinds of citizens<\/h3>\n
![\"Copies](\"https:\/\/fl-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/980b5x\/article71693184.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Sonia%20Gandhi%20book.jpg\" "\\"Copies")
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\n ARUN SANKAR\/AFP\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\nThe loyalty test<\/h3>\n