Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A young Indira Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, during one of his fasts. Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Hindi: ?????? ???????????? ????? Indir? ...
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Indira Gandhi (1917-1984)
Biography for the late Indian Prime Minister, who was born to politics and power, as the granddaughter of Motilal Nehru, an early leader of the Indian ...
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Indira Priyadarshani Gandhi : Iron Lady Of India
A guide to the life of Indira Gandhi. Includes biography, history and photographs. ... (1917-1984) ... All information mentioned herein belong to their ...
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Indira Gandhi: Biography from Answers.com
Indira Gandhi , Political Figure Born: 19 November 1917 Birthplace: Allahabad, India Died: 1984 (assassination) Best Known As: Prime Minister of
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Indira Gandhi
Biography of Indira Gandhi ... After Shastri's death in 1966, Indira Gandhi served as prime minister until ... 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards ...
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{{Infobox Prime Minister| name = Indira Gandhi
इंदिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गांधी| smallimage= Indira2.jpg| birth_date = ], United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, British Raj| death_date = | death_place = New Delhi, India| term_start = [15 January 1980 [1984
[Giani Zail Singh| successor = [Rajiv Gandhi [1966 [1977, [Zakir Hussain (politician), Varahagiri Venkata Giri, Muhammad Hidayatullah, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed| successor2 = [Morarji Desai| term_start3 = [9 March 1984 [1984| successor3 = [Rajiv Gandhi [1967 [1969| successor4 = [Dinesh Singh| term_start5 = [26 June 1970 [1971| successor5 = [Yashwantrao Chavan| children = [Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi-->, during one of the latter's fastsIndira Priyadarshini Gandhi () ([19 November, 1917 - October 31, 1984) She was the Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms from 1966 to 1977and for a fourth term from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. She was India's first and to date only female prime minister.She is noted for creating a dictatorship by declaring Indian Emergency (1975 - 77) after a court struck down her election in 1975, and also for her handling of the Operation Blue Star against Sikh militants, which eventually resulted in her assassination.

Born in the politically influential Nehru-Gandhi family, she grew up in an intensely political atmosphere. Her grandfather Motilal Nehru was a prominent Indian nationalist leader. Returning to India from Oxford University in 1941, she became involved in the Indian Independence movement.

In the 1950s, she served her father unofficially as a personal assistant during his tenure as India's first Prime Minister. After her father's death in 1964, she was appointed as a member of the Rajya Sabha by the President of India and became a member of Lal Bahadur Shastri's cabinet as Minister of Information and BroadcastingGandhi, Indira. (1982) My Truth.

Chosen to become Prime Minister by Congress Party insiders after Shastri's death, Gandhi soon showed an ability to win elections and outmanoeuvre opponents through populism. She introduced more left-wing economic policies and promoted agricultural productivity. A crushing victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan was followed by a period of instability that led her to impose a state of Emergency in 1975; she paid for the authoritarian excesses of the period with three years in opposition.

Returned to office in 1980, she became increasingly involved in an escalating conflict with separatists in Punjab (India) that eventually led to her assassination by her own bodyguards in 1984.

Early life of Indira Gandhi is seated in the center, and standing (L to R) are Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Krishna Hutheesing, Indira, and Ranjit Pandit; Seated: Swaroop Rani, Motilal Nehru and Kamala Nehru (circa 1927).

Indira Priyadarshini, was born on November 19, 1917 to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and his young wife Kamala Nehru. 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. At the time of Indira's birth, Nehru entered the independence movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

Growing up in the sole care of her mother, who was sick and alienated from the Nehru household, Indira 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 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 1936, her mother, Kamala Nehru, finally succumbed to tuberculosis after a long struggle. Indira was 18 at the time and thus never experienced a stable family life during her childhood. She attended prominent Indian, European and British schools like Santiniketan, Badminton School and Oxford, but she showed no incandescence for academics, and was detained from obtaining a degree.

While studying at Somerville College, University of Oxford, England, during the late 1930s, she became a member of the radical pro-independence London based India LeagueFrank, Katherine. (2001) Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi..

In her years in continental Europe and the UK, she met Feroze Gandhi,a Congress activist. Nehru was not happy; Kamala was dead already or dying. Just before the beginning of the Quit India Movement - the final, all-out national revolt launched by Gandhi and the Congress Party. In September 1942 they were arrested by the British authorities and detained without charge. She was ultimately released on 13 May, 1943 having spent over 243 days in jail Frank, Katherine. (2001) Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi. Page 186. In 1944, she gave birth to Rajiv Gandhi with Feroze Gandhi, and followed by Sanjay Gandhi.

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 New Delhi to be at the side of her father, now the Prime Minister, who was living alone in a high-pressure environment at Teen Murti Bhavan. 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 1951, 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 political 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 1958, 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 Gandhi was abroad with Nehru on a foreign visit.

President of the Indian National Congress circa the 1930sDuring 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 27, 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."During the succession struggles after 1965 between Mrs. Gandhi and her rivals, the central Congress leadership in several states moved to displace upper caste leaders from state Congress organizations and replace them with backward caste persons and to mobilize the votes of the latter castes to defeat its rivals in the state Congress and in the oppositiion. The consequences of these interventions, some of which may justly be perceived as socially progressive, have nevertheless often had the consequences of intensifying inter-ethnic regional conflicts... Ibid #2 p. 154

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 people 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.

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'.

With the backing of the Syndicate, in a vote of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Gandhi beat Morarji Desai by 355 votes to 169 to become the fifth Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that position.

Prime Minister Foreign and Domestic Policy and National Security , the second President of India, administering the oath of office to Indira Gandhi on 24 January 1966.When Mrs. Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966 there was no unity in the Congress. Her main party rival, Morarji Desai called her 'Gungi Gudiya' which means 'Dumb Doll'. The internal problems showed in the 1967 election where the Congress lost nearly 60 seats winning 297 seats in the 545 seat Lok Sabha. She had to accommodate Desai as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. In 1969 after a lot of disagreements with Desai, the Congress split. she ruled with support from Socialist Parties for the next two years. In the same year, she nationalised banks.During the 1971 War, the US had sent its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal as a warning to India keep away from 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.

Nuclear Program But Gandhi now accelerated the national nuclear program, as it was felt that the nuclear threat from the People's Republic of 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.

Indira Gandhi was criticized by some for not making the Line of Control a permanent border while a few critics even believed that Pakistan-administered Kashmir should have been extracted from Pakistan, whose 93,000 POW 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.

Green Revolution and Indira Gandhi in 1971. They had a deep personal antipathy that coloured bilateral relations.Special agricultural innovation programs and extra government support launched in the 1960s that had finally resulted in India's chronic food shortages were gradually being transformed into surplus production of wheat, rice, cotton and milk. Rather than relying on food aid from the United States - headed by a President whom Mrs. Gandhi disliked considerably (the feeling was mutual: to Nixon, Indira was "the old witch" BBC News), the country became a food exporter. That achievement, along with the diversification of its commercial crop production, 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. 'Food security', as the programme was called, was another source of support for Mrs. Gandhi in the years leading up to 1975.

Established in the early 1960s, the Green Revolution was the unofficial name given to the Intense Agricultural District Programme (IADP) which sought to insure abundant, inexpensive grain for urban dwellers upon whose support Gandhi -- as indeed all Indian politicians -- heavily depended. Ibid. #3 p. 295 The program was based on four premises: 1) New varieties of seed(s), 2) Acceptance of the necessity of the chemicalization of Indian agriculture, i.e. fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers, etc., 3) A commitment to national and international cooperative research to develop new and improved existing seed varieties, 4) The concept of developing a scientific, agricultural institutions in the form of land grant colleges. Farmer, B.H.,"Prespectives on the 'Green Revolution'. This is widely perceived to have been at the instance of Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian businessman whose family was close to Rajiv's Italian born wife Sonia Gandhi{{cite news| title = CBI to appeal against court order in Bofors case | publisher = [The Hindu | url = http://www.hindu.com/2004/04/11/stories/2004041105640100.htm | date = Apr 11, 2004 -->. Quattrocchi would later be involved in the Bofors Scandal which was politically devastating for Rajiv Gandhi.

After Indira Gandhi's death, Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister.In May 1991, he too was assassinated, this time at the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militants. Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, led the United Progressive Alliance to a surprise electoral victory in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.

Sonia Gandhi declined the opportunity to assume the office of Prime Minister but remains in control of the Congress' political apparatus; Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, formerly finance minister, 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 Khushwant Singh's autobiography - the Tribune - as well as Sanjay's son, Varun Gandhi, are active in politics as members of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party party. At the same time, scandals from Indira Gandhi's final years, including the Ottavio Quattrocchi affair, continue to cast its shadow on Sonia Gandhi{{cite news| title = Runaway Romans | author = Sandhya Jain | publisher = [The Pioneer | url = http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=JAIN110%2Etxt&writer=JAIN&validit=yes | date = March 28, 2007 -->.

Indira Gandhi in popular culture

Although never mentioned by name, Indira Gandhi is clearly the prime minister in A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
In Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, Indira is responsible for the eponymous characters' downfall, referred to throughout the novel as "The Widow." This portrayal of Indira Gandhi raised controversy in some circles for its harsh depiction both of her and of her policies.
In Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, the character of Priya Duryodhani clearly refers to Indira Gandhi.
"Aandhi," a Hindi movie directed by Gulzar, is a partly fictionalized adaptation of some events in Indira's life, particularly her (played by Suchitra Sen) difficult relationship with her husband (played by Sanjeev Kumar (actor)).

External links

Obituary, NY Times, November 1, 1984 Assassination in India: A Leader of Will and Force; Indira Gandhi, Born to Politics, Left Her Own Imprint on India
Website

http://www.bangaloreemployeesforum.com/ARTICLES/2_nehru_family.htm

References Further reading

Ved Mehta, A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982) ISBN 0-19-503118-0
Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (1992) ISBN 9780679424796
Katherine Frank, Indira: the life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (2002) ISBN 0-395-73097-X

{{Persondata|NAME=Gāndhī, Indira Priyadarśinī|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=इन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी (Devanāgarī)|SHORT DESCRIPTION=Prime Minister of India, [Uttar Pradesh, India, [India-->

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Biography and bibliography provided by Professor Pavlac's Women's History Site.

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