India: Sonia Gandhi's memoir 'Belonging: A Journey of Love' released

The book goes through the Italian-born matriarch's journey with one of India's most politically influential families. It has already garnered political controversy, with the ruling BJP accusing her of "whitewashing." "Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were, their motivations, their struggles, their very human flaws. I wanted to portray them honestly, as people I knew and loved," 79-year-old Gandhi wrote in The Hindu daily newspaper earlier this week.

Born Sonia Maino in 1946 in a small Italian village near Vicenza, she met Rajiv Gandhi — the grandson of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — at a restaurant in the United Kingdom's Cambridge city. The two got married in New Delhi in 1968, when Rajiv's mother and Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was serving as India's prime minister. Sonia's husband Rajiv Gandhi, a pilot who was propelled into politics after his mother's death, became India's youngest prime minister at 40 years old.

The Nehru-Gandhi family gave India three prime ministers.