From getting the year of Congress leader Ahmed Patel’s death wrong to muddling the timeline of the Kargil War, Sonia Gandhi’s much-awaited memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, has run into controversy over a series of factual inaccuracies. The errors have raised questions about the editorial scrutiny of a book documenting some of the most significant events in India’s political history. Released on Tuesday, the memoir contains inaccuracies relating to the RSS’s founding year, the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement, Gujarat’s capital, election results, Rahul Gandhi’s criminal defamation case and other major events.Among the most striking errors is the account of the 1999 Kargil conflict. Sonia writes that then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was being hosted by his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad when Ladakhi shepherd Tashi Namgyal spotted Pakistani infiltrators. However, Vajpayee visited Lahore on February 20-21, 1999, while Namgyal spotted the infiltrators on May 3 that year. The book also gets key details of Rahul’s criminal defamation case wrong. It says the Gujarat HC sentenced him to two years in prison in 2023 over remarks made three years earlier. The remarks were made in April 2019, and a Surat magistrate’s court convicted him on March 23, 2023. In Chapter 29, Sonia writes about her close aide Ahmed Patel, saying he “fell victim to the Covid epidemic in 2022”. Patel died on November 25, 2020, following Covid-related complications. In another chapter, she writes: “The RSS, founded in 1921, dreamed of a ‘Hindu nation’.” The organisation was founded by KB Hedgewar in Nagpur on September 27, 1925. The book also identifies Ahmedabad as Gujarat’s capital while discussing the 2002 riots, although Gandhinagar has held that distinction since 1970.