Biography

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Hindi:
इन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी) (November
19, 1917 –
October 31,
1984) was

Prime Minister of India from
January 19,
1966 to
March 24,
1977, and again
from
January 14, 1980
until her

assassination on
October 31,
1984.

Daughter of India's first Prime Minister,

Jawaharlal Nehru, and mother of another,
Rajiv
Gandhi, Indira Gandhi was one of India's most notable and controversial
political leaders.

Early years

The Nehru
family can trace their ancestry to the
Brahmins of

Jammu and Kashmir and
Delhi. Indira's
grandfather

Motilal Nehru was a wealthy barrister of
Allahabad
in
Uttar Pradesh. Nehru was one of the most prominent members of the

Indian National Congress in pre-Gandhi
times and would go on to author the
Nehru
Report, the people's choice for a future Indian system of government as
opposed to the British system. Her father

Jawaharlal Nehru was a well-educated lawyer and was a popular leader of the

Indian Independence Movement. Indira Gandhi was born to his young wife
Kamala; at this
juncture, Nehru entered the independence movement with

Mahatma Gandhi.

Growing up in the sole care of her mother, who was sick and alienated from
the Nehru household, Gandhi developed strong protective instincts and a loner
personality. Her grandfather and father continually being enmeshed in national
politics also made mixing with her peers difficult. She had conflicts with her
father's sisters, including

Vijayalakshmi Pandit, and these continued into the political world.

Indira Gandhi created the
Vanara
Sena movement for young girls and boys which played a small but notable role
in the

Indian Independence Movement, conducting protests and flag marches, as well
as helping Congress politicians circulate sensitive publications and banned
materials. In an often-told story, she smuggled out from her father's
police-watched house an important document in her schoolbag that outlined plans
for a major revolutionary initiative in the early
1930s.

In 1934, her
mother
Kamala Nehru finally succumbed to

tuberculosis after a long struggle. Indira Gandhi was 17 at the time and
thus never experienced a stable family life during her childhood. She attended
prominent Indian, European and British schools like

Santiniketan and
Oxford, but her
weak academic performance prevented her from obtaining a degree.
^{[citation needed]}
In her years in continental Europe and the UK, she met

Feroze Gandhi, a young
Parsee Congress
activist, whom she married in
1942, just before
the beginning of the

Quit India Movement - the final, all-out national revolt launched by
Mahatma Gandhi
and the Congress Party. The couple were arrested and detained for several months
for their involvement in the movement. In
1944, Gandhi gave
birth to
Rajiv
Gandhi, followed by

Sanjay Gandhi two years later .

During the chaotic

Partition of India in
1947, she helped
organize refugee camps and provide medical care for the millions of refugees
from Pakistan.
This was her first exercise in major public service, and a valuable experience
for the tumult of the coming years.

The couple later settled in
Allahabad
where Feroze worked for a Congress Party newspaper and an insurance company.
Their marriage started out well, but deteriorated later as Gandhi moved to
Delhi to be at
the side of her father, now the Prime Minister, who was living alone in a
high-pressure environment. She became his confidante, secretary and nurse. Her
sons lived with her, but she eventually became permanently separated from Feroze,
though they remained married.

When India's first general election approached in
1952, Gandhi
managed the campaigns of both Nehru and her husband, who was contesting the
constituency of
Rae
Bareilly. Feroze had not consulted Nehru on his choice to run, and even
though he was elected, he opted to live in a separate house in Delhi. Feroze
quickly developed a reputation for being a fighter against

corruption by exposing a major scandal in the nationalized insurance
industry, resulting in the resignation of the Finance Minister, a Nehru aide.

At the height of the tension, Gandhi and her husband separated. However, in
1957, shortly after
re-election, Feroze suffered a heart attack, which dramatically healed their
broken marriage. At his side to help him recuperate in
Kashmir,
their family grew closer. But Feroze died on
September
8, 1960, while
she was abroad with Nehru on a foreign visit.

Rise to power

During 1959 and
1960, Gandhi ran
for and was elected the President of the

Indian National Congress. Her term of office was uneventful. She also acted
as her father's chief of staff. Nehru was known as a vocal opponent of
nepotism,
and she did not contest a seat in the
1962 elections.

Nehru died on
May 24, 1964,
and Gandhi, at the urgings of the new Prime Minister

Lal Bahadur Shastri, contested elections and joined the Government, being
immediately appointed

Minister for Information and Broadcasting. She went to
Madras when the
riots over Hindi becoming the national language broke out in non-Hindi speaking
states of the south. There she spoke to government officials, soothed the anger
of community leaders and supervised reconstruction efforts for the affected
areas. Shastri and senior Ministers were embarrassed, owing to their lack of
such initiative. Minister Gandhi's actions were probably not directly aimed at
Shastri or her own political elevation. She reportedly lacked interest in the
day-to-day functioning of her Ministry, but was media-savvy and adept at the art
of politics and image-making.

When the

Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 broke out, Gandhi was vacationing in the border
region of
Srinagar. Although warned by the Army that

Pakistani insurgents had penetrated very close to the city, she refused to
relocate to Jammu
or Delhi. She
rallied local government and welcomed media attention, in effect reassuring the
nation. Shastri died in
Tashkent,
hours after signing the peace agreement with Pakistan's
Ayub Khan,
mediated by the
Soviets.

Shastri had been a candidate of consensus, bridging the left-right gap and
staving off the popular conservative

Morarji Desai. Gandhi was the candidate of the 'Syndicate', regional power
brokers of immense influence, who thought that she would be easily led.
^{[citation needed]}
Searching for explanations for this disastrous miscalculation many years later,
the then

Congress President

Kumaraswami Kamaraj made the strange claim that he had made a personal vow
to Nehru to make Gandhi Prime Minister 'at any cost'. At the time, however, he
and others had dismissed her as a gungi gudiya - literally, a 'dumb
doll'.

With the backing of the Syndicate
^{[citation needed]},
in a vote of the

Congress Parliamentary Party, Gandhi beat Morarji Desai by 355 votes to 169
to become the third Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that
position.

Nuclear security and the Green Revolution

During the 1971
War, the US had sent its

Seventh Fleet to the
Bay
of Bengal as a warning to India not to use the genocide in East Pakistan as
a pretext to launch a wider attack against West Pakistan, especially over the
disputed territory of
Kashmir. This
move had further alienated India from the First World, and Prime Minister Gandhi
now accelerated a previously cautious new direction in national security and
foreign policy. India and the
USSR had earlier
signed the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Cooperation, the resulting political
and military support contributing substantially to India's victory in the
1971 war.

But Gandhi now accelerated the national nuclear program, as it was felt that
the nuclear threat from
China and the
intrusive interest of the two major superpowers were not conducive to India's
stability and security. She also invited the new Pakistani President

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to
Shimla for a
week-long summit. After the near-failure of the talks, the two heads of state
eventually signed the

Shimla Agreement, which bound the two countries to resolve the
Kashmir
dispute by negotiations and peaceful means. It was Gandhi's stubbornness which
made even the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister sign the accord according to
India's terms in which

Zulfikar Bhutto had to write the last few terms in the agreement in his own
handwriting. ^{[citation needed]}

Indira Gandhi was heavily criticized for not extracting the Pakistan-occupied
portion of Kashmir from a humiliated
Pakistan,
whose 93,000 prisoners of
war were under Indian control. But the agreement did remove immediate

United Nations and third party interference, and greatly reduced the
likelihood of
Pakistan launching a major attack in the near future. By not demanding total
capitulation on a sensitive issue from Bhutto, she had allowed Pakistan to
stabilize and normalize. Trade relations were also normalized, though much
contact remained frozen for years.

In 1974, India
successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, unofficially code named as

smiling Buddha, near the desert village of
Pokhran in
Rajasthan.
Describing the test as for "peaceful purposes", India nevertheless became the
world's youngest nuclear power. This move naturally prompted Pakistan's nuclear
program. ^{[citation needed]}

Special agricultural innovation programs and extra government support
launched in the 1960s
had finally resulted in India's chronic food shortages gradually being
transformed into surplus production of wheat, rice, cotton and milk. The country
became a food exporter, and diversified its commercial crop production as well,
in what has become known as the

Green Revolution. At the same time, the White Revolution was an
expansion in milk production which helped to combat malnutrition, especially
amidst young children. Gandhi's economic policies, while socialistic, brought
major industrialization as well. ^{[citation needed]}

Personal life

Indira Gandhi, heroine and icon that she had become after
1971, just like her
father was now more emotionally isolated than ever. The instability of her
childhood had prevented her from developing her own independent personal
interests and lifestyle. It had been her sense of duty and pride in her father
and family legacy that had brought her into politics, but she had never been
given the space to develop as a person. Through the
1950s and
1960s, she had
corresponded with Dorothy Norman, a New York-based journalist, who became a very
close friend via correspondence. But apart from political associates, she had no
personal friends. Her sons were 'studying in England' (neither obtained any
formal degrees from any university). She grew ever more close to her younger
son, Sanjay, who is accused by many historians of misusing his mother's
emotional dependence.

Gandhi may have seen traits of Feroze in Sanjay and was ever-anxious to
please him, as she perceived that

Sanjay blamed her for his father's death. While Rajiv developed as an
independent young man free from politics, Sanjay's reckless youth induced a need
in his mother to take care of her son under all circumstances. The outcome was a
political partnership that eventually resulted in abrogation of democracy,
corruption and abuse of power on a previously unwitnessed scale.
Rajiv
Gandhi is believed to have said that he would never forgive his brother for
what he had done to their mother at a time when she was isolated, depressed and
humiliated after her defeat in the
1977 elections.

Nehru-Gandhi family

Initially

Sanjay had been her chosen heir; but after his death in a flying accident,
his mother persuaded a reluctant
Rajiv
Gandhi to quit his job as a pilot and enter politics in February
1981. He became
Prime Minister on her death; in May 1991, he too was assassinated, this time at
the hands of

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militants. Rajiv's widow,
Sonia
Gandhi, a native Italian, led a novel Congress-led coalition to a surprise
electoral victory in the 2004
Lok Sabha
elections, ousting

Atal Behari Vajpayee and his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from power.

Sonia Gandhi controversially declined the opportunity to assume the office
of Prime Minister but remains in control of the Congress political apparatus;
Dr.
Manmohan Singh, notably a Sikh and a Nehru-Gandhi family loyalist, now heads
the nation. Rajiv's children,
Rahul
Gandhi and

Priyanka Gandhi, have also entered politics. Sanjay Gandhi's widow,

Maneka Gandhi, who fell out with Indira after Sanjay's death and was
famously thrown out of the Prime Minister's house
^{[citation needed]},
as well as Sanjay's son,
Varun
Gandhi, are active in politics as members of the main opposition

BJP party.

Though frequently called The Nehru-Gandhi Family, Indira Gandhi was in
no way related to Mohandas Gandhi. Though the

Mahatma was a family friend, the Gandhi in her name comes from her marriage
to
Feroze Gandhi, a
Parsi.

Contributions

Emergency

Gandhi's government faced major problems after her tremendous mandate of
1971. The internal
structure of the Congress Party had withered following its numerous splits,
leaving it entirely dependent on her leadership for its election fortunes. The

Green Revolution was transforming the lives of India's vast underclasses,
but not with the speed or in the manner promised under

Garibi Hatao. Job growth was not strong enough to curb the widespread
unemployment that followed the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the
OPEC oil shocks.

Gandhi had already been accused of tendencies towards authoritarianism. Using
her strong parliamentary majority, she had amended the Constitution and stripped
power from the states granted under the federal system. The Central government
had twice imposed President's Rule under
Article
356 of the Constitution by deeming states ruled by opposition parties as
"lawless and chaotic", thus winning administrative control of those states.
Elected officials and the administrative services resented the growing influence
of
Sanjay Gandhi, who had become Gandhi's close political advisor at the
expense of men like
P.N.
Haksar, Gandhi's chosen strategist during her rise to power. Renowned public
figures and former freedom-fighters like

Jaya Prakash Narayan,

Ram Manohar Lohia and

Acharya Jivatram Kripalani now toured the North, speaking actively against
her Government.

In June 1975 the

High Court of Allahabad found the sitting Prime Minister guilty of employing
a government servant in her election campaign and Congress Party work.
Technically, this constituted election fraud, and the court thus ordered her to
be removed from her seat in Parliament and banned from running in elections for
six years.

Gandhi appealed the decision; the opposition parties rallied en masse,
calling for her resignation. Strikes by unions and protest rallies paralyzed
life in many states. J.P. Narayan's
Janata
coalition even called upon the police to disobey orders if asked to fire on an
unarmed public. Public disenchantment combined with hard economic times and an
unresponsive government. A huge rally surrounded the Parliament building and
Gandhi's residence in Delhi, demanding her to behave responsibly and resign.

Prime Minister Gandhi advised President

Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a

state of emergency, claiming that the strikes and rallies were creating a
state of 'internal disturbance'. Ahmed was an old political ally, and in India
the President acts upon the advice of an elected Prime Minister alone.
Accordingly, a State of Emergency because of internal disorder, under

Article 352 of the Constitution, was declared on 26 June 1975.

Even before the Emergency Proclamation was ratified by Parliament, Gandhi
called out the police and the army to break up the strikes and protests,
ordering the arrest of all opposition leaders that very night. Many of these
were men who had first been jailed by the British in the
1930s and
1940s. The power to
impose curfews and unlimited powers of detention were granted to police, while
all publications were directly censored by the Ministry for Information and
Broadcasting. Elections were indefinitely postponed, and non-Congress state
governments were dismissed.

The Prime Minister pushed a series of increasingly harsh bills and
constitutional amendments through parliament with little discussion or debate.
^{[citation needed]}
In particular, there was an attempt to amend the Constitution to not only
protect a sitting Prime Minister from prosecution, but even to prevent the
prosecution of a Prime Minister once he or she had left the post. It was clear
that Gandhi was attempting to protect herself from legal prosecution once
emergency rule was revoked. ^{[citation needed]}

Gandhi further utilized President

Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, to issue
ordinances
that did not need to be debated in
Parliament,
allowing her - and Sanjay - to effectively

rule by decree.

Inder Kumar Gujral, a future Prime Minister but then Gandhi's

Minister for Information and Broadcasting, resigned to protest Sanjay's
interference in his Ministry's work.

The Prime Minister's emergency rule lasted nineteen months. During this time,
in spite of the controversy involved, the country made significant economic and
industrial progress. This was primarily due to the end it put to strikes in
factories, colleges, and universities and the disciplining of trade and student
unions. In line with the slogan on billboards everywhere Baatein kam, kaam
zyada, ("Less talk, more work"), productivity increased and administration
was streamlined. Tax evasion was reduced by zealous government officials,
although corruption remained. Agricultural and industrial production expanded
considerably under Gandhi's

20-point programme; revenues increased, and so did India's financial
standing in the international community. Thus much of the urban middle class in
particular found it worth their while to contain their dissatisfaction with the
state of affairs.

Simultaneously, a draconian campaign to stamp out dissent included the arrest
and torture of thousands of political activists; the ruthless clearing of slums
around Delhi's
Jama
Masjid ordered by Sanjay and carried out by

Jagmohan, which left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and thousands
killed, and led to the permanent ghettoisation of the nation's capital; and the
family planning program which forcibly imposed
vasectomy
on thousands of fathers and was often poorly administered, nurturing a public
anger against family planning that persists into the 21st century.

In 1977, greatly
misjudging her own popularity, Gandhi called elections and was roundly defeated
by the Janata Party.
Janata, led by her longtime rival, Desai and with Narayan as its spiritual
guide, claimed the elections were the last chance for India to choose between
"democracy and dictatorship." To the surprise of some - mainly Western -
observers, she meekly agreed to step down.
^{[citation needed]}

Ouster, arrest, and return

Desai became Prime Minister and

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the establishment choice of
1969, became
President of the Republic. Gandhi had lost her seat and found herself without
work, income or residence. The Congress Party split, and veteran Gandhi
supporters like

Jagjivan Ram abandoned her for Janata. The Congress (Gandhi) Party was now a
much smaller group in Parliament, although the official opposition. Unable to
govern owing to fractious coalition warfare, the Janata government's Home
Minister,

Choudhary Charan Singh, ordered the arrest of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi on a
slew of charges. Her arrest and long-running trial, however, projected the image
of a helpless woman being victimized by the Government, and this triggered her
political rebirth.

The Janata coalition was only united by its hatred of Gandhi (or "that woman"
as some called her). Although freedom returned, the government was so bogged
down by infighting that almost no attention was paid to her basic needs. She was
able to use the situation to her advantage. She began giving speeches again,
tacitly apologizing for "mistakes" made during the Emergency, and garnering
support from icons like
Vinoba
Bhave. Desai resigned in June 1979, and Singh was appointed Prime Minister
by the President.

Singh attempted to form a government with his Janata (Secular) coalition but
lacked a majority. Charan Singh bargained with Gandhi for the support of
Congress MPs, causing uproar by his unhesitant coddling of his biggest political
opponent. After a short interval, she withdrew her initial support and President
Reddy dissolved Parliament, calling fresh elections in
1980. Gandhi's
Congress Party was returned to power with a landslide majority.

Operation Blue Star and assassination

Gandhi's later years were bedevilled with problems in

Punjab. A local religious leader

Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was first set up by the local Congress as an
alternative to the regional
Akali Dal
party, but once his activities turned violent he was excoriated as an extremist
and a separatist. In September
1981, Bhindranwale
was arrested in Amritsar, but was released twenty five days later because of
lack of evidence. After his release, he relocated himself from his headquarters
at Mehta Chowk to

Guru Nanak Niwas within the

Golden Temple precincts.^[1]

Disturbed by the spread of militancy by Bhindranwale's group, Gandhi gave the
Army permission to

storm the Golden Temple to flush out Bhindranwale and his followers on June
3, 1984. Many Sikhs were outraged at the perceived desecration of their holiest
shrine, which remains controversial in terms of timing and effect to this day.
Over 20,000 innocent Sikh civilians were killed in this attack.

On
October 31, 1984,
two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards

Satwant Singh and
Beant
Singh assassinated her in the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at
No. 1, Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. As she was walking to be interviewed by the

British actor
Peter
Ustinov, she passed a wicket gate, guarded by Satwant and Beant; when she
bent down to greet them in traditional Indian style, they opened fire with their
semiautomatic machine pistols. She died on her way to hospital, in her official
car, but was not declared dead till many hours later.

Indira Gandhi was cremated on
November 3,
near Raj Ghat
and the place was called

Shakti Sthal. After her death, anti-Sikh
pogroms
engulfed New
Delhi and spread across the country, killing thousands and leaving tens of
thousands homeless.

[1]. Many leaders of the
Delhi

Pradesh Congress Committee, long accused by neutral observers of a hand in
the violence, were tried for incitement to murder and arson some years later;
but the cases were all dismissed for lack of evidence.

Achievements

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