When Sonia Gandhi carried lunch to Tihar for Charles Sobhraj's accomplice
Sonia Gandhi's new memoir reveals that she once delivered a home-cooked Christmas lunch to Tihar Jail for her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and a fellow prisoner. The prisoner was an accomplice of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, whom Indira Gandhi had requested to feed out of sympathy.
Why it matters
The anecdote provides a humanizing historical perspective on the personal life of the Gandhi family during a tumultuous period in Indian politics.
NEW DELHI: On Christmas Day 1978, Sonia Gandhi carried a home-cooked lunch into Tihar Jail for her imprisoned mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, and, at the former Prime Minister's request, enough extra for a young Australian woman she describes as the accomplice of serial killer Charles Sobhraj.The episode appears in Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi's memoir, released on November 10. It is set in the week Indira Gandhi spent in Tihar after the Janata Party, the combined opposition formation, came to power in the elections that followed the Emergency. Sonia writes that she visited the jail daily during that period.Christmas, she recalls, had always been a special day in the household, especially for the children, even when Sanjay and Rajiv were little boys.
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