The Iron Lady of India Indira Gandhi Nehru was
the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was one of the chief figures in India’s
struggle to achieve independence from Britain, was a top leader of the powerful
and long-dominant Indian National Congress,and was the first prime minister
(1947–64) of independent India. Her grandfather Motilal Nehru was one of the
pioneers of the independence movement and was a close associate of Mohandas Gandhi.
She attended, for one year each, Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan (now
in Bolpur, West Bengal state) and then the University of Oxford in England. She
joined the Congress Party in 1938.
In 1942 she married Feroze Gandhi (died 1960), a
fellow member of the party. The couple had two children, Sanjay and Rajiv.
However, the two parents were estranged from each other for much of their
marriage. Indira’s mother had died in the mid-1930s, and thereafter she often
acted as her father’s hostess for events and accompanied him on his travels.
The Congress Party came to power when her father
took office in 1947, and Gandhi became a member of its working committee in
1955. In 1959 she was elected to the largely honorary post of party president.
She was made a member of the Rajya Sabha in 1964, and that year Lal Bahadur
Shastri—who had succeeded Nehru as prime minister—named her minister of
information and broadcasting in his government.
On Shastri’s sudden death in January 1966, Gandhi
was named leader of the Congress Party—and thus also became prime minister—in a
compromise between the party’s right and left wings. Her leadership, however,
came under continual challenge from the right wing of the party, led by former
minister of finance Morarji Desai. She won a seat in the 1967 elections to the
Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament), but the Congress Party
managed to win only a slim majority of seats, and Gandhi had to accept Desai as
deputy prime minister.
Tensions grew within the party, however, and in
1969 she was expelled from it by Desai and other members of the old guard.
Undaunted, Gandhi, joined by a majority of party members, formed a new faction
around her called the “New” Congress Party. In the 1971 Lok Sabha elections the
New Congress group won a sweeping electoral victory over a coalition of
conservative parties. Gandhi strongly supported East Pakistan in its
secessionist conflict with Pakistan in late 1971, and India’s armed forces
achieved a swift and decisive victory over Pakistan that led to the creation of
Bangladesh. She became the first government leader to recognize the new
country.
In March 1972, buoyed by the country’s success
against Pakistan, Gandhi again led her New Congress Party group to landslide
victories in a large number of elections to state legislative assemblies.
Shortly afterward, however, her defeated Socialist Party opponent from the 1971
national election charged that she had violated the election laws in that
contest.
In June 1975 the High Court of Allahabad ruled
against her, which meant that she would be deprived of her seat in the
parliament and would be required to stay out of politics for six years. She
appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court but did not receive a satisfactory
response. Taking matters into her own hands, she declared a state of emergency
throughout India, imprisoned her political opponents, and assumed emergency
powers. Many new laws were enacted that limited personal freedoms. During that
period she also implemented several unpopular policies, including large-scale
sterilization as a form of birth control.
Public opposition to Gandhi’s two years of
emergency rule was vehement and widespread, and after it ended in early 1977,
the released political rivals were determined to oust her and the New Congress
Party from power. When long-postponed national parliamentary elections were
held later in 1977, she and her party were soundly defeated, whereupon she left
office. The Janata Party (precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party) took over
the reins of government, with newly recruited member Desai as prime minister.
In early 1978 Gandhi and her supporters completed
the split from the Congress Party by forming the Congress (I) Party—the “I”
signifying Indira. She was briefly imprisoned (October 1977 and December 1978)
on charges of official corruption. Despite those setbacks, she won a new seat
in the Lok Sabha in November 1978, and her Congress (I) Party began to gather
strength.
Dissension within the ruling Janata Party led to the fall of its
government in August 1979. When new elections for the Lok Sabha were held in
January 1980, Gandhi and Congress (I) were swept back into power in a landslide
victory. Her son Sanjay, who had become her chief political adviser, also won a
seat in the Lok Sabha. All legal cases against Indira, as well as against
Sanjay, were withdrawn.
Sanjay Gandhi’s death in an airplane crash in
June 1980 eliminated Indira’s chosen successor from the political leadership of
India. After Sanjay’s death, Indira groomed her other son, Rajiv, for the
leadership of her party. She adhered to the quasi-socialist policies of
industrial development that had been begun by her father. She established
closer relations with the Soviet Union, depending on that country for support
in India’s long-standing conflict with Pakistan.
During the early 1980s Indira Gandhi was faced
with threats to the political integrity of India. Several states sought a
larger measure of independence from the central government, and Sikh
separatists in Punjab state used violence to assert their demands for an
autonomous state. In 1982 a large number of Sikhs, led by Sant Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale, occupied and fortified the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple)
complex at Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine.
Tensions between the government and the Sikhs
escalated, and in June 1984 Gandhi ordered the Indian army to attack and oust
the separatists from the complex. Some buildings in the shrine were badly
damaged in the fighting, and at least 450 Sikhs were killed (Sikh estimates of
the death toll were considerably higher). Five months later Gandhi was killed
in her garden in New Delhi in a fusillade of bullets fired by two of her own
Sikh bodyguards in revenge for the attack in Amritsar. She was succeeded as
prime minister by her son Rajiv, who served until 1989.source- britannica.com
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