Indira Gandhi
President
Preceded by Succeeded by
In office 22 August 1967 14 March 1969 Preceded by Succeeded by Mahommedali Currim Chagla Dinesh Singh
Born
31 October 1984 (aged 66) New Delhi, India Indian Indian National Congress Feroze Gandhi Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi Adi Dharm
A young Indira Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, during one of his fasts Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Hindi: Indir Priyadarin Gndh; ne: Nehru; (19 November 1917 31 October 1984) was the Prime Minister of the Republic of India for three consecutive terms from 1966 to 1977 and for a fourth term from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, a total of fifteen years. She was India's first and, to date, only female Prime Minister. Born in the politically influential Nehru Family, she grew up in an intensely political atmosphere. Despite the same last name, she is of no relation to the statesman Mohandas Gandhi. Her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, was a prominent Indian nationalist leader. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a pivotal figure in the Indian independence movement and the first Prime Minister of Independent India. Returning to India from Oxford 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 the first Prime Minister of India. 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 Broadcasting.[1]
The then Congress Party President K. Kamaraj was instrumental in making Indira Gandhi the Prime Minister after the sudden demise of Shastri. Gandhi soon showed an ability to win elections and outmaneuver opponents through populism. She introduced more left-wing economic policies and promoted agricultural productivity. A decisive 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 that eventually led to her assassination by her own bodyguards in 1984.
Contents
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1 Early life o 1.1 Growing up in India o 1.2 Studying in Europe o 1.3 Marriage to Feroze Gandhi 2 Early leadership o 2.1 President of the Indian National Congress o 2.2 Minister of Information and Broadcasting 3 Prime Minister o 3.1 First term 3.1.1 Domestic policy 3.1.2 War with Pakistan in 1971 3.1.3 Foreign policy 3.1.4 Devaluation of the Rupee 3.1.5 Nuclear weapons program 3.1.6 Green Revolution 3.1.7 1971 election victory, and second term (1971-1975) 3.1.8 Verdict of electoral malpractice 3.1.9 Protests and civil disobedience 3.1.10 State of Emergency (1975-1977) 3.1.11 Rule by decree 3.1.12 Elections 3.1.13 Corruption charges 3.1.14 Removal, arrest, and return o 3.2 Third term 3.2.1 Currency crisis 3.2.2 Operation Blue Star and assassination 4 Personal life o 4.1 Nehru-Gandhi family 5 Indira Gandhi in popular culture 6 Controversies 7 See also 8 References 9 External links
10 Further reading
In early 1940, Indira spent time in a rest home in Switzerland to recover from chronic lung disease. As she had during her childhood, she maintained her long-distance relationship with her father in the form of long letters. They argued about politics.[3] In her years in continental Europe and the UK, she met a young Parsi man active in politics, Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas Gandhi).[4] After returning to India, Feroze Gandhi grew close to the Nehru family, especially to Indira's mother Kamala Nehru and Indira herself. Feroze helped nurse the ailing Kamala too.
The Nehru family - Motilal Nehru 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 and Mahatma Gandhi circa the 1930s 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.
While the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 was ongoing, 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 and instead rallied local government and welcomed the media attention. The Pakistan attack was successfully repelled, and Prime Minister Shastri in January 1966 signed a peace agreement with Pakistan's Ayub Khan, mediated by the Soviets in Tashkent. A few hours later, Shastri was dead of a heart attack.[10] The Indian National Congress President K. Kamaraj was then instrumental in making Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, despite the opposition from Morarji Desai who was later defeated by the members of the Congress Parliamentary Party, where Indira 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.
Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second President of India, administering the oath of office to Indira Gandhi on 24 January 1966.
[edit] War with Pakistan in 1971 Main article: Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 The Pakistan army conducted widespread atrocities against the civilian populations of East Pakistan.[12][13] An estimated 10 million refugees fled to India, causing financial hardship and instability in the country. To solve the refugee problem, Indira Gandhi declared war on Pakistan, helping the East Pakistanis gain their independence. The United States under Richard Nixon supported Pakistan, and mooted a UN resolution warning India against going to war. Nixon apparently disliked Indira personally, referring to her as a "witch" and "clever fox" in his private communication with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (now released by the State Department).[14]. Indira signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, resulting in political support and a Soviet veto at the UN. India was victorious in the 1971 war, and Bangladesh was born. [edit] Foreign policy She 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. Due to her antipathy for Nixon, relations with the United States grew distant, while relations with the Soviet Union grew closer. 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 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(sealed) for years. [edit] Devaluation of the Rupee During the late 1960s, Indira's administration decreed a 40% devaluation in the value of the Indian Rupee from 4 to 7 to the US Dollar to boost trade. [edit] Nuclear weapons program A national nuclear program was started by Mrs. Gandhi in 1967, in response to the nuclear threat from the People's Republic of China and to establish India's stability and security interests as independent from those of the nuclear superpowers. 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 became the world's youngest nuclear power.
Richard Nixon 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 finally transformed India's chronic food shortages 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"[15]), 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 program was called, was another source of support for Mrs. Gandhi in the years leading up to 1975.[16] Established in the early 1960s, the Green Revolution was the unofficial name given to the Intense Agricultural District Program (IADP) which sought to insure abundant, inexpensive grain for urban dwellers upon whose support Gandhias indeed all Indian politiciansheavily depended.[17] 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 gr