Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi ( 19 November 1917 - 31 October 1984 ) was an Indian politician and stateswoman who served as the prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. She was India's first and, to date, only female prime minister, and a central figure in Indian politics as the leader of the Indian National Congress (INC). She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, and the mother of Rajive Gandhi, who succeeded her as prime minister. Gandhi's cumulative tenure of 15 years and 350 days makes her the second-longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father. Henry Kissinger described her as an "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her tough personality.
During her father Jawaharlal Nehru's premiership from 1947 to 1964, Gandhi was his hostess and accompanied him on his numerous foreign trips. In 1959, she played a part in the dissolution of the communist-led Kerala state government as then-president of the Indian National Congress, otherwise a ceremonial position to which she was elected earlier that year. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded Nehru as prime minister upon his death in 1964, appointed her minister of information and broadcasting in his government; the same year she was elected to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament. After Shastri's sudden death in January 1966, Gandhi defeated her rival, Morarji Desai, in the INC's parliamentary leadership election to become leader and also succeeded Shastri as prime minister. She was the world's second female prime minister after Sirimavo Bandaranaike when she became Prime Minister of India. She led the Congress to victory in two subsequent elections, starting with the 1967 general election, in which she was first elected to the lower house of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha. In 1971, her party secured its first landslide victory since her father's sweep in 1962, focusing on issues such as poverty. But following the nationwide state of emergency she implemented, she faced massive anti-incumbency sentiment causing the INC to lose the 1977 election, the first time in the history of India to happen so. She even lost her own parliamentary constituency. However, due to her portrayal as a strong leader and the weak governance of the Janata Party, her party won the next election by a landslide and she returned to the premiership.
As prime minister, Gandhi was known for her uncompromising political stances and centralization of power within the executive branch. In 1967, she headed a military conflict with China in which India repelled Chinese incursions into the Himalayas. In 1971, she went to war with Pakistan in support of the independence movement and war of independence in East Pakistan, which resulted in an Indian victory and the independence of Bangladesh, as well as increasing India's influence to the point where it became the sole regional power in South Asia. Another military operation against Pakistan, codenamed Operation Meghdoot, occurred during her tenure in 1984, which led to India expanding the territory it effectively controlled in the disputed Kashmir region.
Gandhi also played a crucial role in initiating India's first successful nuclear weapon test in 1974. Her rule saw India grow closer to the Soviet Union by signing a friendship treaty in 1971 to ward off perceived geopolitical threat as a result of the U.S. warming up to China. India received military, financial, and diplomatic support from the Soviet Union during its conflict with Pakistan in the same year. Though India was at the forefront of the Non-Aligned Movement, Gandhi made it one of the Soviet Union's closest allies in Asia, each often supporting the other in proxy wars and at the United Nations.
Responding to separatist tendencies and a call for revolution, she instituted a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977, during which she ruled by decree and basic civil liberties were suspended. More than 100,000 political opponents, journalists and dissenters were imprisoned. She faced the growing Sikh separatism movement throughout her fourth premiership; in response, she ordered Operation Blue Star, which involved military action in the Golden Temple and killed hundreds of Sikhs. On 31 October 1984, she was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, both of whom were Sikh nationalists seeking retribution for the events at the temple.
Gandhi is remembered as the most powerful woman in the world during her tenure. Her supporters cite her leadership during victories over geopolitical rivals China and Pakistan, the Green Revolution, a growing economy in the early 1980s, and her anti-poverty campaign that led her to be known as "Mother Indira" ( a pun on Mother India) among the country's poor and rural classes. Critics note her cult of personality and authoritarian rule of India during the Emergency. In 1999, she was named "Woman of the Millennium" in an online poll organized by the BBC. In 2020, she was named by Time magazine among the 100 women who defined the past century as counterparts to the magazine's previous choices for Man of the Year.
Early life and career
Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru, into a Kashmiri Pandit family on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad (present-day Prayagraj) in Uttar Pradesh. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a leading figure in the Indian movement for independence from British rule, and became the first Prime Minister of the Dominion (and later Republic) of India. Indira was her parents' only surviving child (she had a younger brother who died while young); she grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large family estate in Allahabad. In 1930, the Nehru family donated the mansion to the Indian National Congress and renamed it Swaraj Bhavan (meaning abode of freedom). A new mansion was built nearby to serve as the family residence and given the name of the old Anand Bhavan. Indira had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Her father was often away, directing political activities or incarcerated, while her mother was frequently bedridden with illness and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis. Indira had limited contact with her father, mostly through letters.
Indira Nehru was taught mostly at home by tutors and attended school intermittently until matriculation in 1934. She was a student at the Modern School in Delhi, St. Cecilia's and St.Mary's Convent school in Allahabad, the International School of Geneva in Geneva, the Ecole Nouvelle in Bex in Vaud, Switzerland, and the Pupil's Own School in Poona in Maharashtra and in Bombay, which is affiliated with the University of Mumbai. She and her mother moved to the Belur Math headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission where Swami Ranganathananda was her guardian. Indira then studied at the Vishwa Bharati in Shantiniketan, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1951. During an interview with Rabindranath Tagore, he named Indira Priyadarshini, which means "looking at everything with kindness" in Sanskrit and she became known as Indira Priyadarshini Nehru. A year later, however, she had to leave university to attend to her ailing mother in Lausanne, Switzerland. There it was decided that Indira would continue her education at the University of Oxford. After her mother died, Indira attended the Badminton School in Bristol, England for a short time period and then enrolled at Somerville College in Oxford in 1937 to study history. She had to take the entrance examination twice, having failed at her first attempt with a poor performance in Latin. At Oxford, she excelled in history, political science, and economics but her grades in Latin- a compulsory subject- remained poor. However she was active socially at the university and was a member of the Oxford Majlis Asian Society.
During her time in Europe, Indira Nehru was plagued with ill health and was constantly attended to by doctors. She had to make repeated trips to Switzerland to recover, disrupting her studies. She was there in 1940, when Germany rapidly conquered Europe. Nehru tried to return to England through Portugal but was left stranded for nearly two months. She managed to enter England in early 1941, and from there returned to India without completing her studies at Oxford. The university later awarded her an honorary degree. In 2010, Oxford honoured her further by selecting her as one of the ten Oxasians, illustrious Asian graduates from the University of Oxford. During her stay in Britain, Nehru frequently met her future husband Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi). They were married in Allahabad according to Adi Dharm rituals, although Feroze belonged to a Zoroastrian Parsi family of Gujarat. The couple had two sons, Rajiv Gandhi (born 1944) and Sanjay Gandhi (born 1946).
In September 1942, Indira Gandhi was arrested over her role in the Quit India Movement. She was released from jail in April 1943. "Mud entered our souls in the drabness of prison,"she later recalled her time in the jail. She added, "When I came out, it was such a shock to see colors again I thought I would go out of my mind."
In the 1950s, Indira, now Indira Gandhi after her marriage, unofficially served her father as a personal assistant during his tenure as the first prime minister of India. Near the end of the 1950s, Gandhi served as the president of the Congress. In that capacity, she was instrumental in having the communist-led Kerala state government dismissed in 1959. That government was India's first elected communist government. After her father's death in 1964 she was appointed a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house) and served in Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's cabinet as Minister of Information and Broadcasting. In January 1966, after Shastri's death, the Congress legislative party elected her over Morarji Desai as their leader. Congress party veteran K. Kamaraj was instrumental in Gandhi achieving victory. Because she was a woman, other political leaders in India saw Gandhi as weak and hoped to use her as a puppet once elected: Congress President Kamaraj orchestrated Mrs. Gandhi's selection as prime minister because he perceived her to be weak enough that he and the other regional party bosses could control her, and yet strong enough to beat Desai [her political opponent] in a party election because of the high ragard for her father... a woman would be an ideal tool for the Syndicate.
Prime minister (1966 - 1977)
Gandhi's first eleven years serving as prime minister saw her evolve from the perception of Congress party leaders as their puppet, to a strong leader with the iron resolve to split the party over her policy positions, or to go to war with Pakistan to assist Bangladesh in the 1971 liberation war. At the end of 1977, she was such a dominating figure in Indian politics that Congress party president D.K. Barooah had coined the phrase "India is Indira and Indira is India".
First Year
Gandhi formed her government with Morarji Desai as deputy prime minister and finance minister. At the beginning of her first term as prime minister, she was widely criticised by the media and the opposition as a "Goongi goodiya" (Hindi for a "dumb doll") of the Congress party bosses who had orchestrated her election and then tried to constrain her. Indira was a reluctant successor to her famed father, although she had accompanied him on several official foreign visits and played an anchor role in bringing down the first democratically elected communist government in Kerala. According to certain sources it was the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia that first derided her personality as the "Goongi Goodiya" (Hindi for "dumb doll") that later was echoed by other Congress politicians who were wary of her rise in the party.
One of her first major actions was to crush the separatist Mizo National Front uprising in Mizoram in 1966.
1967-1971
The first electoral test for Gandhi was the 1967 general elections for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. The Congress Party won a reduced majority in the Lok Sabha after these elections owing to widespread disenchantment over the rising prices of commodities, unemployment, economic stagnation and a food crisis. Gandhi was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Raebareli constituency. She had a rocky start after agreeing to devalue the rupee which created hardship for Indian businesses and consumers. The importation of wheat from the United States fell through due to political disputes.
For the first time, the party also lost power or lost its majority in a number of states across the country. After the 1967 elections, Gandhi gradually began to move towards socialist policies. In 1969, she fell out with senior Congress party leaders over several issues. Chief among them was her decision to support V.V.Giri, the independent candidate rather than the official Congress party candidate Neelam Sanjiva Reddy for the vacant position of president of India. The other was the announcement by the prime minister of Bank nationalisation without consulting the finance minister, Morarji Desai. These steps culminated in party president S. Nijalingappa expelling her from the party for indiscipline. Gandhi, in turn, floated her own faction of the Congress party and managed to retain most of the Congress MPs on her side with only 65 on the side of the Congress (O) faction. The Gandhi faction, called Congress (R), lost its majority in the parliament but remained in power with the support of regional parties such as DMK. The policies of the Congress under Gandhi, before the 1971 elections, also included proposals for the abolition of the privy Purse to former rulers of the princely states and the 1969 nationalization of the fourteen largest banks in India.
Military conflict with China
In 1967, a military conflict alongside the border of the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, then an Indian protectorate, broke out between India and China. India won by repelling Chinese attacks and forced the subsequent withdrawal of Chinese forces from the region. Throughout the conflict, the Indian losses were 88 killed and 163 wounded while Chinese casualties stood at 340 killed and 450 wounded, according to the Indian Defense Ministry. Chinese sources made no declarations of casualties but alleged India to be the aggressor.
In December 1967, Indira Gandhi remarked these developments that "China continues to maintain an attitude of hostility towards us and spares no opportunity to malign us and to carry on anti-Indian propaganda not only against the Indian Government but the whole way of our democratic functioning". In 1975, Gandhi incorporated Sikkim into India, after a referendum in which a majority of Sikkimese voted to join India. The move was condemned as being a "despicable act of the Indian Government" by China. Chinese government mouthpiece China Daily wrote that "the Nehrus, father and daughter, had always acted in this way, and Indira Gandhi had gone further".
1971-1977
Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty) was the resonant theme for Gandhi's 1971 political bid. The slogan was developed in response to the combined opposition alliance's use of the two-word manifesto-"Indira Hatao" (Remove Indira). The Garibi Hatao slogan and the proposed anti-poverty programs that came with it were designed to give Gandhi independent national support, based on the rural and urban poor. This would allow her to bypass the dominant rural castes both in and of state and local governments as well as the urban commercial class. For their part, the previously voiceless poor would at last gain both political worth and political weight. The programs created through Garibi Hatao, though carried out locally, were funded and developed by the Central Government in New Delhi. The program was supervised and staffed by the Indian National Congress party. "These programs also provided the central political leadership with new and vast patronage resources to be disbursed... throughout the country".
The Congress government faced numerous problems during this term. Some of these were due to high inflation which in turn was caused by wartime expenses, drought in some parts of the country and, more importantly, the 1973 oil crisis. Opposition to her in the 1973-75 period, after the Gandhi wave had receded, was strongest in the states of Bihar and Gujarat. In Bihar, Jayaprakash Narayan, the veteran leader came out of retirement to lead the protest movement there.
