Indian stateswoman and prime minister (196677, 19804), born in Allahabad, NE India, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru. She studied at Visva-Bharati University (Bengal), and in 1942 married Feroze Gandhi (d.1960). She became president of the Indian Congress Party (195960), minister of information (1964), and prime minister following the death of Shastri. After her conviction for election malpractices, she declared a state of emergency (19757), and was premier again in 1980. She achieved a considerable reputation through her work as a leader of the developing nations, but was unable to stem sectarian violence at home. She was assassinated in New Delhi by Sikh extremist members of her bodyguard.
Indira Gandhiइन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी
|
|
|
| 5th and 8th Prime Minister of India | |
|---|---|
|
In office January 19, 1966 – March 24, 1977 January 15, 1980 – October 31, 1984 |
|
| Preceded by |
Gulzarilal Nanda Charan Singh |
| Succeeded by |
Morarji Desai Rajiv Gandhi |
| Born |
November 19, 1917 Allahabad, UP, India |
| Died |
October 31, 1984 New Delhi, India |
| Political party | Congress (I) |
Indira Priyadarśinī Gāndhī (Devanāgarī: इन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी, IPA: [ɪnd̪ɪraː prɪjəd̪ərʃɪniː gaːnd̪ʰiː]) (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 remarkable political leaders after independence. In spite of her famous surname, she was of no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.
Early years
The Nehru family can trace their ancestry to the Brahmins of Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi. 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.
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 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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
At the height of the tension, Gandhi and her husband separated. But Feroze died on September 8, 1960, while Gandhi 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.
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. Minister Gandhi's actions were probably not directly aimed at Shastri or her own political elevation.
When the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 broke out, Gandhi was vacationing in the border region of Srinagar.
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 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.
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. 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 occupied Kashmir should have been extracted from a humiliated Pakistan, whose 93,000 prisoners of war were under Indian control.
In 1974, India successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, unofficially code named as smiling Buddha, near the desert village of Pokhran in Rajasthan.
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. Gandhi's economic policies remained socialistic and did not bring major industrialization.
Emergency
Gandhi's government faced major problems after her tremendous mandate of 1971.
Gandhi had already been accused of tendencies towards authoritarianism. 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.
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.
Gandhi appealed the decision; 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.
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.
The Prime Minister pushed a series of increasingly harsh bills and constitutional amendments through parliament with little discussion or debate. 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.
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. Agricultural and industrial production expanded considerably under Gandhi's 20-point programme;
Simultaneously, a draconian campaign to stamp out dissent included the arrest and torture of thousands of political activists;
In 1977, greatly misjudging her own popularity, Gandhi called elections and was roundly defeated by the Janata Party.
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.
The Janata coalition was only united by its hatred of Gandhi (or "that woman" as some called her).
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. Gandhi's Congress Party was returned to power with a landslide majority.
Indira Gandhi was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (for 1983-84).
Operation Blue Star and assassination
Gandhi's later years were bedevilled with problems in Punjab.
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.
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.
Indira Gandhi was cremated on November 3, near Raj Ghat and the place was called Shakti Sthal.
After her death, anti-Sikh riots engulfed New Delhi , killing thousands and leaving many homeless.
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. 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; 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 , 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.
User Comments Add a comment…