The Congress leader’s newspaper columns have given her a new platform to challenge Modi’s politics, defend India’s constitutional values, and reclaim a public voice after stepping back from active politics.
Published : Sep 07, 2026 14:02 IST – 7 MINS READ
Sonia Gandhi’s memoir marks her second coming, following a series of newspaper essays that have made her one of the sharper critics of the Modi government. | Photo Credit: @INCIndia via PTI
Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, penned after she decided to limit her role in politics, boosts her second coming, this time as a writer and critic. Even before the memoir made headlines, Gandhi had taken to publishing articles in newspapers at a frequency never seen before in her political career—as many as 12 pieces since June 29, 2024.
Perhaps writing is, for Gandhi, a substitute for what she can’t do at her 79 years of age: crisscross the country to mobilise people against Hindutva and resurrect the Congress’ lost glory. This task she has assigned to her children, Rahul and Priyanka, choosing instead to become the party’s grand matriarch through words of acerbic wisdom.
The timeline of the publication of her articles suggests another reason: only two of her 12 articles were written between June 2024 and February 2025. After that, she unsheathed her pen, perhaps in response to dashed hopes that Modi’s electoral setback in the 2024 Lok Sabha election—the BJP failed to win a majority on its own—would liberate the media from his control, thus emboldening it to critique him.
It’s this media silence on Modi that Gandhi has sought to break with her writings. All of her articles are blistering attacks on his substance and style of governance. They also invariably remind readers of India’s shift away from the constitutional and civilisational values that had defined its being until Modi came to power in the summer of 2014.
Gandhi set the pace with her very first piece, “Preaching Consensus, Provoking Confrontation”, published on June 29, 2024. She decoded the 2024 Lok Sabha verdict as a “personal, political, and moral defeat for a Prime Minister who had awarded himself a divine status during the campaign”. The election result, she insisted, was an unequivocal rejection of Modi’s brand of divisive politics.
Gandhi has been remarkably prescient, too. In that June 29 piece, she devoted just a paragraph to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test “scandal”, yet her analysis foretold the tumult over it two years later. The “scandal” was a reference to the leaking of examination papers, dozens of students securing perfect scores, and the granting of grace marks to those who took the test at certain locations. She excoriated Modi for being silent on the havoc his government has rained on lakhs of students, ascribing the mess in the education system to the policy of privatising it.
She returned to this topic in “The ‘3Cs’ that haunt Indian education today”, published on March 31, 2025. The three Cs were the Centre’s misguided attempt at centralising the education sector, its commercialisation, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions.
The article had an impressive analysis of changes in education policies and also shocking data to mull: 89,441 primary schools had closed, and 42,944 new private schools had mushroomed since 2014. Her concluding sentence was telling: “This carnage of India’s public education system must end.”
The “carnage”, unfortunately, did not end, provoking a harried Gen Z into organising a powerful protest movement in June-July. After their march to Parliament was brutally attacked, she wrote a piece in an “I-warned-you” tone, reflected in its headline: “Student protests are the consequences of Modi government policies.”
She linked the Gen Z unrest to the government’s retreat from public education. The state’s responsibility towards the economically weak has been a consistent ideological position in her writings, most eloquently spelt out in her scathing piece on the “bulldozed demolition” of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.
Her instinct to anticipate the Modi government’s moves is borne out in a piece she wrote on its decision to advance women’s reservation and conduct delimitation based on the 2011 Census. The government justified this move by claiming that the counting of caste would delay the publication of the Census 2027—and, therefore, also the implementation of women’s reservation.
This is not true, argued Gandhi, pointing to the government’s boast that the findings of the Census would be available in 2027 itself, because of it being conducted digitally. The Prime Minister’s real intent, she wrote, is to “further delay and derail the caste census”. The enumeration of caste has not been delayed, but adopting the proven failed methodology of the 2011-12 Socio Economic and Caste Census to do so will certainly lead to its derailment.
Exposing policy and principles
Four of Gandhi’s pieces have been on India’s muted response to Israel’s genocidal killings in Gaza, its two attacks, in 2025 and 2026, on Iran, and the assassination of its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. In them, she repeatedly cautioned that India’s silence on the genocide is “not neutrality”, and that it could be interpreted as “complicity” in the massacre.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint press meet in Jerusalem on February 26, 2026. | Photo Credit: @IsraeliPM X/ANI Photo
Worse, Modi’s silence, Gandhi argued, risks India’s leadership in the Global South. This status was not acquired accidentally. It was earned by speaking against South Africa’s apartheid regime, backing Algeria’s struggle for freedom, siding with Vietnam in its fight against “foreign brutality”, and decisively intervening to prevent genocide in East Pakistan, ultimately midwifing the birth of Bangladesh. In one of her pieces, she said, “Palestine is a test of India’s ethical and civilisational heritage”.
Her commitment to this heritage is brought out vividly in “The ‘livery of India’s freedom’ is under threat”, a piece published on August 20, 2024. In it, she saw in the fluttering of the Indian tricolour the values of the national movement soar.
She described the threat to the national flag through a backstory: until 2022, it had to be made of “hand-spun and hand-woven wool/cotton/silk khadi bunting”. In that year, the 75th year of India’s Independence, the Flag Code was amended to allow the national flag to be machine-made and also of polyester.
Symbolism and censorship
For Gandhi, the shift away from flags primarily made of khadi betrays the memory of the national movement. During the colonial rule, khadi became an “instrument to locate sovereignty and self-sufficiency in the individual”. In today’s India, the use of khadi is emblematic of sustainable development and a commitment to the “ongoing journey of national integration and revitalisation”.
But by allowing machine-made flags, the government has revealed its support for big corporates, oligopolisation, and structural dismantling of the nation’s micro, small, and medium enterprises sector. The last, she said, is “home to our handloom industries”. Yet again, Gandhi’s stance on the state’s role is unmissable.
Gandhi’s feisty newspaper pieces are now set to be followed by her memoir. Her refusal to accede to the demand of Penguin Random House India to excise references to Modi and the RSS from her memoir turns her into both a victim of the culture of censorship—and a doughty opponent of it as well. This impression will boost her book’s sales.
The contents of her memoir aren’t known yet, but I hope she describes in detail the hardships India’s religious minorities have endured over the past 12 years. None of her 12 pieces discussed above were exclusively devoted to their anxieties of living under Hindutva’s shadow. Many will also be keen to know her response to the allegation that she became an alternative power centre to Manmoham Singh during his 10 years of prime ministership.
No less interesting would be to read her account of the pressures dynastic politics mounts on its beneficiaries. The contradictory implications of dynasticism can be glimpsed in Democratic Dynasties: State, Party, and Family in Contemporary India, a book edited by academic Kanchan Chandra. The understanding of it would infinitely deepen with Sonia Gandhi’s insights into dynastic politics, from which she gained incalculably and suffered heartbreakingly.
Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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