‘Chori’ Ek ‘Art’ Hai… And Sonia Gandhi is the ‘Artist’! Has her memoir ‘Belonging’ mastered the art of ‘Copy-Paste’?

If heist is an art, Antonia Edvige Albina Maino and her illustrious family are indisputably the grandmasters of the craft. And why look any further when the royal mata of the Congress party have gifted us yet another masterclass in creative borrowing?

 

 

This week marks the grand arrival of Sonia Gandhi’s much-hyped, 544-page memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love. The Congress ecosystem has rolled out the red carpet, hyperventilating with praise and framing it as an epic chronicle of a nineteen-year-old language student from Cambridge transforming into the sovereign matriarch of India’s oldest political party.

 

When Michelle Obama released her book Becoming, everyone talked about that sharp, black-and-white cover. Now, look at Belonging. The exact same pose, the exact same hand near the chin, the exact same black-and-white look. Even the title sits at the top in the same font style, with the author's name stamped across the bottom. You do not even need a magnifying glass to see what happened here. They basically took Michelle Obama’s cover, swapped the face, changed two letters in the title, and called it a day.

 

 

 

When pointed out the loyal ecosystem is scrambling to defend this, claiming that "portraits always look similar" and there are only so many ways to click a photo. Really? Let us test that logic. Millions of books have portraits on the cover, yet they do not look like photocopies of one another. You can excuse one similarity as a coincidence, maybe even two. But when the black-and-white filter, the exact camera angle, the hand resting near the chin, the title placement at the top, and the author's name in clean capital letters at the bottom all match down to the last pixel that is not a coincidence. That is a Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V job.

 

 

 

Then again, why are we surprised? Taking something that belongs to someone else and slapping your own label on it is practically a family heirloom in this dynasty. Remember how Indira Gandhi borrowed the "Gandhi" surname a name with zero blood relation to Mahatma Gandhi—and turned it into the ultimate political jackpot for decades? From borrowing a surname to build an empire, to borrowing Michelle Obama’s book cover to sell a memoir, the playbook has never changed. When your entire political survival is built on borrowed identity and borrowed credit, copying a dust jacket is just muscle memory.

 

Of course, the plagiarism doesn't stop at the dust jacket. Inside those 544 pages, the creative liberties taken with history are nothing short of breathtaking. While the Congress ecosystem is currently busy hyperventilating with praise, hailing the book as the literary event of the century, independent fact-checkers and analysts have been having a field day counting the gaps.

 

From misdating Nelson Mandela’s Bharat Ratna visit to confusing Vice-President K.R. Narayanan with a fictional "President R.K. Narayan" during Mandela’s 1994 inauguration, the book reads less like an autobiography and more like a work of alternate historical fiction.

 

 

 

According to exhaustive reviews of the memoir, the book manages to rack up an astonishing 55 factual and contextual blunders. It seems meticulous fact-checking was considered entirely optional in the royal household.

 

Ultimately, Belonging is a masterclass in selective memory, a 544-page exercise in airbrushing reality where the cover is borrowed, the dates are optional, and the hard questions are left strictly at the door. While the loyal ecosystem may applaud the fiction, history has a stubborn habit of keeping the receipts, proving once again that you can plagiarize a cover and rewrite the past, but you cannot edit away the truth.

 

Let us be real for a second. Will this book be a bestseller? Oh, absolutely. Not because readers are lining up outside bookstores, but because the party high command has practically turned this into a mandatory homework assignment. Congress workers are being nudged to buy copies in bulk, and stacks of them are already being handed out for free like election pamphlets.

 

When you control the ecosystem, you do not need actual readers you just need loyal foot soldiers to clear the warehouse. And let us face it, after copying a book cover and getting basic Indian history wrong fifty-five times, manufacturing a bestseller is probably the easiest part of the job.