The Red Sari, a controversial fiction account on Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s life by Spanish author Javier Moro, was finally released in India on Friday, seven years after its worldwide publication. In the midst of accusation that the Congress prevented its release in India while in power, the party strongly denied the charge.
The Congress claimed there was an attempt to create a hype around the book for publicity and that the party would not object its publication since it never attacked freedom of speech and expression.
At the same time, AICC spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi maintained that if anything objectionable would be published then every citizen who is aggrieved has an equal right to go to court and assert that legal right. “There is no question of Congress raising the voice,” he said.
The book examines the lives of the Nehru-Gandhi family and is set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War, the Emergency, Operation Blue star and other events that have shaped modern Indian history.
Through a tweet the Roli’s Book editorial director Priya Kapoor on Thursday had announced that The Red Sari has now been published in India. The book, first published in Spanish with the title ‘El Sari Rojo’ in 2008, had created a controversy with the Congress chief’s lawyers then describing it as containing “untruths, half truths, falsehoods and defamatory statements” and serving Moro with a legal notice in 2010.
“From her idyllic childhood to her passionate love affair and from her days as a docile daughter-in-law to her current status of being the only Indian politician to have refused prime ministership, The Red Sari tells the story of an extraordinary woman whose dreams of home, hearth and anonymous living were struck down by the hands of fate,” the book’s blurb says.
According to the publishers, the 455-page book, priced at Rs395, is an “Indianised version” of the original work. Moro, whose earlier book “Pasion India” has been translated into 17 languages, traces the journey of Sonia with information sourced from close friends and colleagues.
“To suggest or insinuate, as appears from some quarters that a foreign author was unable to publish a book for 10 long years is an insult to Indian democracy. You can say that for variety of his own commercial reasons, he did not publish his book but does he know that India has a constitution, the most vibrant set of courts in the word, judicial review, fundamental rights and nobody can be prevented by this kind of a blanket statement of publishing a book. It can be a different matter if you choose not to publish a book,” Singh said during the AICC briefing.