The only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira was raised in a home that was at the centre of India’s nationalist movement during its most tumultuous period. Her grandfather Motilal Nehru was also a freedom fighter; her father occupied centre stage within the Congress Party for two decades before independence in 1947; and her mother, although less involved politically, was subject to political arrest by the British.
Indira has described her childhood as lonely, with some of her most vivid remembrances being the entry into her home of British policemen. Because her parents did not want to send her to any of the British schools in India, her education took place at a series of Indian schools and at non-British schools in Europe, with a number of private tutorials interspersed between periods at school.
Indira’s marriage to Feroze Gandhi in 1942 was almost universally denigrated by orthodox Hindus, primarily because it was an intercommunal not arranged by her parents. Her father, Jawaharlal opposed the marriage on grounds that the couple were somewhat incompatible because both possessed fiery tempers. Publicly, however, both her father and Mahatma Gandhi strenuously defended the marriage.
Arrested and jailed for nationalist activities shortly after their marriage, Indira was imprisoned for eight months and Feroze for a full year. Feroze then became editor of The National Herald, a newspaper founded by his father-in-law, and Indira became the principal confidant and hostess of her father during the period of Nehru’s prime ministership.
The death of Feroze from a heart attack in 1960, and the subsequent death of her father in 1964, caused Indira to become increasingly withdrawn into herself and her immediate family until she was chosen as party leader and prime minister in January 1966.
Selected as prime minister by party bosses Indira was at first quite pliable and compromising. However, after the Congress suffered unprecedented defeats in the 1967 General elections, hard on the heels of a devaluation of the rupee that adversely affected the poorer segments of the Indian population, she became dramatically assertive and opted for a series of choices that pitted her directly against the Congress Party high command, which had previously been built up by her father.
As a consequence of her backing V. V. Giri for the presidency of India in 1969 and her activities in subsequent election campaigns, Mrs. Gandhi caused a major split in the Congress Party, resulting in the eventual acceptance by the Election Commission of the official name Congress Party-Indira (or Congress-I) to describe the party led by Indira.
Indira’s Congress-I, gained an unprecedented two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament in the early 1970s. The initial thrust for such dominance came from an overwhelming victory in the 1971 elections, fought around the slogan garibi hatao (abolish poverty). Claiming that she had “a time-bound scientific programme for abolishing poverty,” Indira secured substantial support in 1971 from India’s lower castes, minority groups, and the urban poor.
When, in 1971, her government waged a successful war against Pakistan in support of the Bangladesh liberation movement—in the face of diplomatic opposition from both China and the United States and a lack of international support—Mrs. Gandhi was often likened to a goddess by ordinary Indians, and her popularity within India reached a crest never equaled before or thereafter.
Expectations raised by the garibi hatao campaign and India’s victory over Pakistan in 1971 led to great disappointment and political difficulties in the mid-1970s, owing in part to the severe economic problems associated with a multifold increase in world oil prices between 1973 and 1975 but also to the inclination of Mrs. Gandhi to become more and more defensive and insecure in the face of mounting political and economic problems.
In June 1975 Mrs. Gandhi took the unprecedented but constitutional step of jailing her opponents under emergency provisions of the constitution after she had been convicted by the Allahabad High Court for electoral impropriety.
The so-called Emergency lasted until March 1977. This time people deserted the Congress in General elections and it was defeated by a coalition of parties known as the Janata Party. Factionalism among the Janata partners and their inability to succeed in bringing Mrs. Gandhi to trial (despite her arrest and several attempts to build a legal case against her) resulted in the defeat of the Janata government in 1979 elections and the return of Mrs. Gandhi’s to a dominant position in Indian politics.
After Mrs. Gandhi returned to power, her government was confronted with serious challenges to its ability to maintain law and order as conflicts between religious and ethnic groups broke out in different parts of the country. There was widespread violence in North-east, particularly in Assam over the Bangladeshi people.
An even more severe threat to national unity came from the violence in Punjab. After the army had invaded the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most revered shrine of the Sikhs, which had been held as an armed camp by a group of militant, she became the target for Sikh anger, and on 31 October 1984 she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. Her son Rajiv was chosen by her party to succeed her.
Mrs. Gandhi is said to have been shy and diffident as a young woman, and people who knew her well have stressed that despite her domineering public personality in later life, she retained her strong sense of privacy. Her elegant, aristocratic manner was often in striking contrast to that of the politicians who surrounded her.
It is difficult to give a summary evaluation of Mrs. Gandhi’s role in modern India. While it is generally agreed that she was a very skillful politician and that she was enormously popular with the masses.
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