Congress says Penguin India sought cuts on Modi, RSS and China in Sonia memoir

Senior Congress leaders spent Friday and Saturday accusing Penguin Random House India of yielding to pressure over Sonia Gandhi's memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love. Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot said the Indian company wanted passages on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and what he called China's occupation of Indian territory during Modi's tenure taken out. He said Penguin's global arm was ready to publish the book as written.

The fight began after The Indian Express reported that Penguin Random House India would not bring out an India edition because Gandhi rejected editorial changes and deletions in part of the manuscript. Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint in the United States, had already announced a 544-page hardcover for 10 November. The catalogue text describes the book as an account of India's post-Independence politics and of sixty years of economic and social change, written from inside the Congress family.

Penguin India answered with a careful denial. It said it is not the publisher of Belonging in India. It said any suggestion that it dropped the book because the author refused edits does not accurately reflect the circumstances. Fact-checking and recommendations, it said, are both a prerogative and a duty. In a later line it added that during discussions it had remained willing and keen to publish.

Those two sentences do not name the disputed passages. They also do not explain who will hold the India rights if Knopf ships an unaltered English edition into the country through import channels. Gehlot used that gap. He asked why a text that can appear worldwide cannot appear in India, and called any suppression a murder of freedom of expression and of democracy.

Kamal Nath called the refusal to print the book in India a matter of grave concern and asked whether the decision was independent. Gaurav Gogoi said people in the BJP government had become afraid of a book being read. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, for the BJP, said whether the work is a memoir or fiction is a matter between author and publisher, and that a publisher will test a book labelled as memoir before it commits. Amit Malviya questioned Penguin's appeal to fact-checking and implied the Congress was spinning the row.

No manuscript page has been released. The public record is a set of claims about three subjects: Modi, the RSS, and the border with China. Gehlot told The Indian Express those were the main items the publisher wanted edited or removed. Penguin has not confirmed that list. The company has also not published the fact-check queries it says it raised.

The industrial structure matters here. Knopf Doubleday and Penguin Random House India sit in the same global group and still run separate lists. A New York imprint can accept a manuscript that a Delhi office treats as a legal and political risk. Defamation law, the risk of injunctions, and the atmosphere around books on the current government all sit on the Delhi side of that split. None of that is proof of a phone call from a ministry. It is the mechanism that makes Gehlot's pressure charge possible to argue and impossible, from outside, to close.

Gandhi chairs the Congress Parliamentary Party. She has not issued her own detailed statement on the edits. The November date still stands on the Knopf list. If that edition appears uncut, Indian readers will be able to import it. The political question the Congress wants to keep alive is why the same sentences are treated as publishable in New York and as a problem in Gurugram.

Publishers fact-check memoirs as a matter of course. They also drop books when the legal file looks expensive. The missing piece in this case is the paper: the marked-up chapters, the queries, and the author's replies. Until those exist in public, the country has a row about a book most people have not read, and a publisher that says it wanted the book even as it says it is not the publisher.