Sonia Gandhi’s ‘Belonging’: when legal review becomes a publishing battleground

Stories from the publishing world do not usually become front page news, but the controversy over the hotly anticipated Sonia Gandhi memoir, Belonging , has done just that. An unheralded part of the editorial process, the legal read, has become the subject of national discussion.

It appears from statements made by Penguin Random House India that some of the book’s contents were flagged by the publisher’s lawyers for deletion, and after some rounds of discussion, the author was not willing to remove them, and consequently the publication by Penguin in India was shelved . Although the publisher has not revealed what the deleted portions were, and has said the discussions were confidential, sources have variably suggested they concerned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), communal riots and Chinese occupation of Indian territory.