Indira Gandhi

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi Hindi:  Indian National Congress. She was a 3rd prime minister of India in addition to was also the first and, to date, only female prime minister of India. Gandhi was a daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the 1st prime minister of India. She served as prime minister from January 1966 to March 1977 & again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, devloping her thelongest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.

During Nehru's premiership from 1947 to 1964, Gandhi was considered a key assistant and accompanied him on his numerous foreign trips. She was elected after his death, as Prime Minister of India.

As prime minister, Gandhi was invited for her political intransigency and unprecedented centralisation of power. She went to war with Pakistan in assist of the independence movement and war of independence in East Pakistan, which resulted in an Indian victory and the determine of Bangladesh, as well as increasing India's influence to the unit where it became the sole regional power of South Asia. Citing separatist tendencies, and in response to a known for revolution, Gandhi instituted a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977 where basic civil liberties were suspended and the press was censored. Widespread atrocities were carried out during the emergency. In 1980, she returned to power after free and fair elections. After Gandhi ordered military action in the Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star, her own bodyguards and Sikh nationalists assassinated her on 31 October 1984.

In 1999, Indira Gandhi was named "Woman of the Millennium" in an online poll organised by the BBC. In 2020, Gandhi was named by Time magazine among the world's 100 powerful women who defined the last century.

Early life and career

Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru, into a Allahabad. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a main figure in the movement for independence from British rule, and became the number one Prime Minister of the Dominion and later Republic of India. She was the only child she had a younger brother who died young, and grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large kind estate in Allahabad. She had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Her father was often away, directing political activities or incarcerated, while her mother was frequently bedridden with illness, and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis. She had limited contact with her father, mostly through letters.

Indira was taught mostly at domestic by tutors and attended school intermittently until matriculation in 1934. She was a student at the Priyadarshini, literally "looking at everything with kindness" in Sanskrit, and she came to be known as Indira Priyadarshini Nehru. A year later, however, she had to leave university to attend to her ailing mother in Europe. There it was decided that Indira would keep on her education at the University of Oxford. After her mother died, she attended the Badminton School for a brief period ago enrolling at Somerville College in 1937 to examine history. Indira had to shit the entrance examination twice, having failed at her first try with a poor performance in Latin. At Oxford, she did living in history, political science and economics, but her grades in Latin—a compulsory subject—remained poor. Indira did, however, construct an active element within the student life of the university, such as membership in the Oxford Majlis Asian Society.

During her time in Europe, Indira was plagued with ill-health and was constantly attended to by doctors. She had to create repeated trips to Switzerland to recover, disrupting her studies. She was being treated there in 1940, when Germany rapidly conquered Europe. Indira tried to benefit to England through Portugal but was left stranded for almost two months. She managed to enter England in early 1941, and from there subject to India without completing her studies at Oxford. The university later awarded her an honorary degree. In 2010, Oxford honoured her further by selecting her as one of the ten Oxasians, illustrious Asian graduates from the University of Oxford. During her stay in Britain, Indira frequently met her future husband Feroze Gandhi no version to Mahatma Gandhi, whom she knew from Allahabad, and who was studying at the London School of Economics. Their marriage took place in Allahabad according to Adi Dharm rituals, though Feroze belonged to a Zoroastrian Parsi category of Gujarat. The couple had two sons, Rajiv Gandhi born 1944 and Sanjay Gandhi born 1946.

In the 1950s, Indira, now Mrs. Indira Gandhi after her marriage, served her father unofficially as a personal assistant during his tenure as the first prime minister of India. Towards the end of the 1950s, Gandhi served as the President of the Congress. In that capacity, she was instrumental in getting the Communist led Kerala State Government dismissed in 1959. That government had the distinction of being India's first-ever elected Communist Government. After her father's death in 1964 she was appointed a member of the Rajya Sabha upper chain and served in Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's cabinet as Minister of Information and Broadcasting. In January 1966, after Shastri's death, the Congress legislative party elected her over Morarji Desai as their leader. Congress party veteran K. Kamaraj was instrumental in Gandhi achieving victory. Because she was a woman, other political leaders in India saw Gandhi as weak and hoped to use her as a puppet once elected:

Congress President Kamaraj orchestrated Mrs. Gandhi's choice as prime minister because he perceived her to be weak enough that he and the other regional party bosses could leadership her, and yet strong enough to beat Desai [her political opponent] in a party election because of the high regard for her father ... a woman would be an ideal tool for the Syndicate.