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 "The Red Sari", the English translation of the 2008
Spanish-language "El sari rojo", hit bookstands in India last
week, seven months after the party was ousted after a decade in
power.
"I'm thankful, because they gave me a fabulous free publicity
campaign," said Moro, speaking in Spanish about the protests
against the book at an event in India's capital on Tuesday.
"The Red Sari" was ranked second among new releases on the
Amazon India website's bestseller list on Wednesday.
The Italian-born Gandhi, 68, has played a reduced public role
since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya
Janata Party snatched power from the Congress in May.
Moro said he was surprised there were no books available on the
media-shy politician, who rose from obscurity after her marriage
into India's Gandhi dynasty and was thrust into the limelight as
the widow of an assassinated former premier.
Gandhi took over the reins of a floundering Congress party in
1998 and was the architect of its unexpected triumph in national
elections six years later.
In what was seen as a masterstroke in the wake of protests over
her Italian birth, she declined to become prime minister,
preferring to wield power from behind the scenes.
Moro wrote his book on Gandhi without her consent, calling it
the "dramatized" biography of a public figure considered one of
the world's most powerful women. Any writer would be lucky to
get his hands on material such as Sonia's life, he said.
Congress party leaders had opposed the publication of the book
in 2010 and threatened to take legal action. Moro, an Indophile
writer like his uncle Dominique Lapierre, said he stayed away
from the country after his effigies were burned.
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Among parts of the book that riled the Congress was the assertion
that Gandhi had considered leaving India after her husband was
killed in 1991.
Moro said he did not know if Gandhi had read the book, adding that
at their only meeting, she told him that the Gandhis never read
what's written about them.
On Wednesday, a Congress leader said the party had never been
comfortable with the idea of proscribing books.
"There may be exigencies at times, but we need to find more subtle
ways of dealing with it," Manish Tewari told Reuters in a text
message.
Despite the "incomprehensible" delay to publish a book he says
contains nothing offensive, Moro's faith in the freedom of
expression in India has not been shaken.
"There is a free press, there is free expression," he said, warning
that in any democracy, vigilance was needed to protect free speech.
The 59-year-old writer, who won Spain's highest literary award in
2011, said he would never again write about a living person as it
was too much trouble.
"I'll write about people who have been dead for a long time," Moro
said. "And whose lawyers are also totally dead."
(Additional reporting by Krista Mahr; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel
and Nick Macfie)
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