New Delhi: Days after its release, Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love is facing a political storm. The 544-page book, published by HarperCollins India, came out on November 10, after a long delay and months of pre-publication controversy. Attention has now turned to how it describes the violence that killed members of Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge’s family in 1948.

Social media users say page 484 of the book describes the 1948 violence in Kharge’s village as “caste riots” or a generic “communal riot”. They say it does not name the Razakars, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s private militia, as the perpetrators. Political commentator Dilip Mandal and BJP leader Priti Gandhi were among those who flagged the passage on X, and the posts spread quickly.

What happened in Varavatti

According to Kharge’s own accounts in public interviews, including a conversation with Kapil Sibal in June 2026, the Razakars attacked Varavatti village in Bidar district in 1948, before Hyderabad’s integration into the Indian Union. Kharge was a child of about six or seven. His family’s home was set on fire. His mother Saibavva, a sister, a brother and an uncle were killed. His father, Mapanna, was working nearby and managed to rescue him and flee.

Critics say that describing an attack by a state-backed militia as a caste or communal riot obscures the historical record. They accuse the book of sanitising events by leaving out the Razakars’ role. Some of them point out the irony that the book’s subject matter includes Kharge himself. Sonia Gandhi has cited Kharge, along with Manmohan Singh, as an example of leaders who rose through the party by different routes.

In a post on X, BJP leader Priti Gandhi said that a “horrifying chapter” of India’s history deserved honesty rather than sanitisation. She recalled that in 1948 the Razakars, the armed militia of the Nizam’s Hyderabad State, attacked Mallikarjun Kharge’s village of Varawatti in Bidar, set his family home on fire and killed his mother, sister, brother and uncle. She wrote that Kharge’s father, who was working in the fields, saved his seven-year-old son and fled with him, and that the two reportedly spent weeks hiding in the forest. She described the Razakars as a militia that terrorised those who opposed the Nizam’s rule and Hyderabad’s refusal to join India.

Pointing to page 484 of Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, she said that if the book describes the tragedy only as a “communal riot”, the wording deserves serious scrutiny, because it reduces the Razakars’ violence to a generic label that hides who carried it out. She said she was not trying to exploit Kharge’s personal loss but to respect the victims and refuse to whitewash atrocities, and she called on Sonia Gandhi to tell history honestly. She ended by demanding an apology and a correction, asking whether that was too much to expect.

Supporters of the memoir say it is a personal account in which politics is only a backdrop. Gandhi herself describes politics in the book as “a kind of framework”. Some commentators argue the attacks on the book are politically motivated.