Written off as a puppet, Indira Gandhi became India's most dominant leader
When Indira Gandhi became prime minister in 1966, critics mocked her as a pliable figurehead for Congress party bosses. Eleven years later a party president declared that India was Indira. Between those points she split her party, went to war, oversaw a nuclear test, and suspended civil liberties for nearly two years.
She was born Indira Nehru on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, into a Kashmiri Pandit family. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, led the independence movement and became India's first prime minister. Her schooling was patchy, with home tutors and a string of schools in India and Switzerland, and poor health often interrupted it. In September 1942 she was jailed for her part in the Quit India Movement, emerging in April 1943; she later wrote that on release the sight of colours came as a shock.
During her father's premiership she acted as his hostess and assistant and travelled with him abroad. As Congress president in 1959 she helped bring about the dismissal of Kerala's communist-led state government. After Nehru's death, Lal Bahadur Shastri made her minister of information and broadcasting, and when Shastri died in January 1966 she beat Morarji Desai for the party leadership. She governed from the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, the first prime minister to do so.
She centralised power and took hard positions. In 1967 Indian troops pushed back Chinese incursions in the Himalayas; in 1971 she backed the Bangladeshi independence struggle by going to war against Pakistan, and signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. India carried out its first successful nuclear test in 1974. From 1975 to 1977 she ruled by decree under a state of emergency, and more than 100,000 opponents, journalists and dissenters were jailed.
Returned to office in 1980, she faced a Sikh separatist movement and ordered army action at the Golden Temple, in which hundreds died. On 31 October 1984 two of her Sikh bodyguards assassinated her. Her total of almost sixteen years in office is second only to her father's, and her son Rajiv succeeded her.
Source: Indira Gandhi
