Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi was an Indian stateswoman and central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. She served in India from 1966 until 1984, when her life ended in assassination. Her political career was full of controversies.

Childhood and early life:

Indira Gandhi was born on November 19, 1917, in Allahabad, India. The lone child of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, she ascended to the position after his death in the mid- the 1960s.  She was a stubborn and highly intelligent woman, she attended school in India, Switzerland and England, including Somerville College, Oxford.

Marriage and Family life:

With her father among the leaders of the Indian independence movement, Gandhi weathered his absences when he was imprisoned.  She endured the loss of her mother to tuberculosis in 1936. She found comfort with a family friend, Feroze Gandhi, but their relationship was a controversial one due to his Parsi heritage. Eventually, the couple earned Nehru’s approval and they married in 1942.

Feroze soon became a prominent force against the corruption in the Nehru led government. He exposed a major scandal involving insurance companies and the Finance Minister T.T Krishnamachari.  He continued to challenge the Central government till he died in 1960 after a major cardiac arrest.

Political rise:

Indira Gandhi joined the Congress Party’s working committee in 1955, and four years later she was elected the party’s president. Following the death of her father in 1964, she was appointed to Rajya Sabha, the upper level of Indian parliament, and was named the minister of information and broadcasting. When her father’s successor Lal Bahadur Shastri died in 1966, she ascended to the post of the Prime Minister.

Seemingly on shaky ground following the Congress Party’s narrow win in the 1967 election, Gandhi surprised her father’s old colleagues with her resilience. In 1969, after she acted unilaterally to nationalize the country’s banks, Congress Party elders sought to oust her from her role. Instead, Gandhi rallied a new faction of the party with her populist stance, and cemented her hold on power with a decisive parliament victory in 1971.

War and Domestic Success:

That year, India was drawn into a bloody conflict between East and West Pakistan, with some 10 million Pakistanis seeking refuge in India. Following the surrender of Pakistani forces in December, Gandhi invited Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the city of Simla for a summit. The two leaders signed the Simla agreement, agreeing to resolve territorial disputes in a peaceful fashion.

During this time, India was achieving tangible success through advancements of the Green Revolution. Gandhi introduced the high-yield seeds and irrigation, eventually producing a surplus of grains. The prime minister led her country into the nuclear age with the detonation of an underground device in 1974.

Imprisonment:

Despite the advancements, Gandhi was criticized for authoritarian tendencies and government corruption under her rule. In 1975, the Allahabad High court found her guilty of dishonest election practices, excessive election expenditure and of using government resources for party purposes. Gandhi stepped down with her defeat in 1977 election. She was briefly jailed in 1978 on charges of corruption, but the following year she won the election in Lok Sabha. In 1980, she returned to power as Prime Minister.
That same year, Gandhi’s son Sanjay, who had been serving as her chief political adviser, died in a plane crash in New Delhi. The Prime Minister then began preparing her other son Rajiv for leadership.



Assassination:

During the early 1980s, Gandhi faced increasing pressure from secessionist factions, particularly from Sikhs in Punjab. In 1984, she ordered the Indian army to confront Sikh separatists at their sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar, resulting in several hundred reported casualties, with others estimating the human toll to be significantly higher.
On October 31, 1984, Gandhi was shot and killed by two of her bodyguards, both Sikhs, in retribution for the attack at the Golden Temple. She was immediately succeeded by son Rajiv, who was left to quell deadly anti-Sikh riots, and her body was cremated three days later in a Hindu ritual.