Sonia Gandhi Says Neither She Nor Rahul Got Money in National Herald Case

New Delhi: Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has asserted that neither Rahul Gandhi nor she ever received a penny from the National Herald revival process, as she accused the BJP of playing accuser and the judge simultaneously to target opposition leaders.

In her memoir "Belonging: A Journey Of Love", Sonia Gandhi also says it broke her heart to witness the level of aggression her son has had to endure because of targeting by the Narendra Modi government and the BJP.

As common as such attacks are in politics, this was a "fully-funded and well-organised campaign" projecting him as an entitled and petulant man with little understanding of the political world, she says, slamming attempts at tarnishing her son's image.

Rahul was given derogatory epithets, social media trolls were unleashed to mock him and distort practically every word he uttered, she says in the book.

"I knew from my own experience that comforting words served little purpose. I'd drop into his house, give him a hug, and sit quietly with him. I'd send him dishes he liked. Or, when he happened to be away on work, I'd go to his house, play with his beloved terriers in the garden, and send him pictures of them," she says.

Those were my ways of empathising with him, Gandhi says.

"But I could see also his personal struggle: Apart from his political work and tours, he read copiously, continued practising Vipassana meditation, and worked on his fitness regularly, becoming a black belt in the Aikido school of martial arts. In 2018, he performed the Kailash-Mansarovar parikrama, an arduous trek to circumambulate the sacred 21,000-foot Mount Kailash in Tibet. He had a pillar of strength in his sister and the staunch support of his close friends," she says.

Sonia Gandhi claims that a tactic that the BJP and RSS have employed against their opponents is to play accuser and judge simultaneously -- to manufacture an assumption of guilt and either let the implicated persons crumble under pressure or keep the matter hanging without bringing it to a legal resolution, as happened with her husband Rajiv Gandhi.

Over the years Rahul has had no less than 30 cases brought against him across eight states, all politically motivated, with the clear intention of keeping him going from court to court, preoccupied with lawyers; but if they intended to paralyse him politically, they must have been disappointed, she says.

One of the cases was brought in 2023 for "criminal defamation" that three years earlier, at a political rally he'd listed several fraudsters by the surname Modi who'd fed the country with large amounts of public money, she says.

"On the outlandish grounds that he had thereby defamed all citizens named Modi, he was sentenced by the Gujarat High Court to two years' imprisonment, expelled from Parliament, and made to vacate his MP's residence. The prospect of the general election a year later could have had something to do with this conviction: it would disqualify him from contesting. However, the court granted him bail, and he appealed to the Supreme Court," she points out.

Sonia Gandhi says that with a heavy heart, she watched Rahul, Priyanka by his side, calmly handing over the keys of the house and shaking hands with the staff one by one as he bid them goodbye.

"I, too, was named with him in a case when we tried to revive the National Herald, a newspaper founded in Lucknow by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1938 as an independent organ of the national movement against British rule. Decades later the paper had fallen in both quality and readership. We thought its revival was imperative: the mainstream press and TV channels were now mostly controlled by corporate interests hostile to the Congress," she writes.

In 2010, after seeking advice from reputable accounting and legal experts, we set out to revive and revamp the National Herald on the basis of a new 'not-for-profit' entity, Sonia Gandhi says.

"This official designation disallows any shareholder or director receiving any monetary benefit whatsoever; none of the directors on its board, neither Rahul nor I, nor any of the others associated with this revival process, have ever received a penny from the enterprise. Yet a case of 'criminal conspiracy' was framed against us, and in December 2015 we appeared before a court to ask for bail," she says.

Four years later, the ED launched a parallel prosecution at the direction of the government, she notes.

"It conducted several 'interrogations' where we -- Rahul and I included -- were summoned to their office and grilled for days. After dragging on for more than twelve years, the issue continues to be adjudicated in court," Sonia Gandhi recounts.

So it was with allegations against Priyanka's businessman husband Robert that began in 2014, she adds.

After 10 years of "investigation" -- periodic summons from government agencies, threats of impending arrest, and hugely inflated tax penalties the government agencies have framed charges in one of the many cases filed against him, Sonia Gandhi says.

Despite these difficulties, Priyanka's family remains a close-knit one, and was in fact strengthened by all they went through, she says.

"Belonging: A Journey of Love", published by HarperCollins India, hit the stands on Tuesday.