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Indira Gandhi

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

   Indira Gandhi
   इन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी
   Indira Gandhi
     __________________________________________________________________

   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'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 Nehru; 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 was 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 1951, 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 1958, 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 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. 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'.

   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.
   Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi in 1971
   Enlarge
   Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi in 1971
   Mohammadreza Pahlavi King of Iran and Indira Gandhi
   Enlarge
   Mohammadreza Pahlavi King of Iran and Indira Gandhi
   MG_Ramachandran and Indira Gandhi
   Enlarge
   MG_Ramachandran and Indira Gandhi

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 the People's Republic of 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 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. 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 code named as 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.

   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. 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 in milk production which helped to combat
   malnutrition, especially amidst young children. Gandhi's economic
   policies remained socialistic and did not bring major
   industrialization. This would finally occur in 1991, with the opening
   of the Indian economy.

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 underclasses, 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 June 26, 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 repression 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 programme; 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 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. 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 bedevilled 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 the hospital, in her official car, but
   was not declared dead until many hours later.

   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. 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.

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. He became Prime
   Minister on her death; in May 1991, he too was assassinated, this time
   at the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militants. 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; Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, formerly
   finance minister, now heads the nation. 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.

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