Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi was an Indian politician and stateswoman who served as the 3rd Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, and the mother of Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her in office as the country's sixth prime minister. Furthermore, Gandhi's cumulative tenure of 15 years and 350 days makes her the second-longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.
In 1959, she played a part in the dissolution of the Communist-led Kerala state government as then-president of the Indian National Congress, otherwise a ceremonial position to which she was elected earlier that year. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded Nehru as prime minister upon his death in 1964, appointed her minister of information and broadcasting in his government; the same year she was elected to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.
Indira Gandhi is remembered as the most powerful woman in the world during her tenure. Her supporters cite her leadership during victories over geopolitical rivals China and Pakistan, the Green Revolution, a growing economy in the early 1980s, and her anti-poverty campaign that led her to be known as "Mother Indira"among the country's poor and rural classes. However, critics note her authoritarian rule of India during the Emergency and atrocities carried out during Operation Blue Star and the Punjab Insurgency. In 1999, Gandhi was named "Woman of the Millennium" in an online poll organized by the BBC. In 2020, Gandhi was named by Time magazine among the 100 women who defined the past century as counterparts to the magazine's previous choices for Man of the Year.
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi & Feroze Gandhi
Indira Gandhi & Jawaharlal Nehru
Indira Gandhi & her family
Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru, into a Kashmiri Pandit family on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a leading figure in the movement for independence from British rule, and became the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of India. She was the only child, and grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large family estate in Allahabad. In 1930, the Nehru family donated the mansion to the Indian National Congress, and renamed it Swaraj Bhavan
Indira was taught mostly at home by tutors and attended school intermittently until matriculation in 1934. She was a student at the Modern School in Delhi, St. Cecilia's and St. Mary's Convent schools in Allahabad, the International School of Geneva, the Ecole Nouvelle in Bex, and the Pupils' Own School in Poona and Bombay, which is affiliated with the University of Mumbai. She and her mother Kamala moved to the Belur Math headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission where Swami Ranganathananda was her guardian. She went on to study at the Vishwa Bharati in Santiniketan, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1951. It was during her interview with him that Rabindranath Tagore named her 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 continue her education at the University of Oxford. After her mother died, she attended the Badminton School for a brief period before enrolling at Somerville College in 1937 to study history.
In the 1950s, Indira, now Mrs. Indira Gandhi after her marriage, Feroze 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 family of Gujarat. The couple had two sons, Rajiv Gandhi (born 1944) and Sanjay Gandhi (born 1946).
Indira Gandhi built upon the foundations laid by Jawaharlal Nehru to convert India into a growing nuclear power. India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear experiment” as she described it on May 18, 1974, building up the country’s capability without anyone finding out. Without this the nuclear tests of May 1998 would not have been possible and India’s achievements in nuclear science, technology and energy would have been far from strong and self-reliant. Yet, like her father, she was a firm believer in the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Nuclear Programme Of India
Space Liberation
The Indian space programme received its biggest impetus under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, a firm believer in self-reliance, who supported Indian scientists and technologists as they created the Indian Space Research Organisation and its network of institutions. Her emphasis was on the peaceful use of space technology for communications, weather forecasting, remote sensing and education. Concerned with the security situation in our neighbourhood she gave full political support to the missile development programme in the early eighties. Her leadership of this programme paved the way for India to emerge as one of the world’s leading space powers.
