Sonia Gandhi's memoir reveals two secret cancer scares and surgeries abroad

For years, Sonia Gandhi kept her health largely out of public view. Now, in her new memoir, the Congress leader (Congress is India's main opposition party) describes two cancer scares and the surgeries that followed.

The book, Belonging: A Journey of Love, is 526 pages long and was released on Tuesday by HarperCollins India. Gandhi turns 80 next month.

What does she reveal?

Gandhi writes that apart from occasional asthma and allergies, she had no serious health troubles until the second UPA term (the Congress-led coalition government). Doctors told her stress was a main cause of stomach disorders, which grew more frequent as she was drawn into politics.

In 2010, doctors suspected breast cancer and advised surgery. "I felt shaken and worried; there was no time to lose," she recalls. She chose not to be treated at Mumbai's Tata Memorial Hospital, worried about media attention, and went to the European Institute of Oncology near Milan, Italy.

Her children Rahul and Priyanka, Priyanka's husband Robert Vadra and her sisters travelled with her. Surgeon Dr Umberto Veronesi led the operation. Two tumours were removed, one of them as a precaution, and an intra-operative radiation procedure spared her five weeks of radiotherapy.

A second scare and a fall

A year later, a follow-up exam found a growth in her pancreas. The family first feared the earlier cancer had returned. She was treated at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam by Dr Casper van Fijck.

This time she told only then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a few senior colleagues. After surgery, the doctor said the tumour had been found early and was in a preliminary precancerous stage.

Gandhi also writes about August 2016, when she collapsed during an election rally in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, after a convoy that lasted nearly five hours. She was flown to Delhi. The fall badly broke her shoulder and needed another operation.

Why it matters

The memoir also covers her childhood in post-war Italy, her marriage into the Nehru-Gandhi family, the assassination of her husband Rajiv Gandhi and her entry into politics. The health chapters add a personal side to a public life she says she always tried to keep private.