Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (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. She was India's
first and to date only female prime minister.
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. 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'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. 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. 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, 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.
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
codenamed 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.
Innovative agricultural programs and additional government support launched in
the 1960s had finally resulted in India's chronic food shortages gradually being
transformed into surpluses 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 of milk production to combat malnutrition, especially amidst
young children.
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 under
classes, 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.
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. 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 program; 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.
Ouster, Arrest, and Return
Desai became Prime Minister and Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the establishment choice
of 1979, 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.
Indira Gandhi was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (for 1983-84).
Operation Blue Star and Assassination
Gandhi's later years were bedeviled 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.
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.
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 filming a documentary for Irish television, 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. She 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. 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.
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