Prime minister of India Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi Indian politician who was the first female prime minister of India, serving for three consecutive terms (1966–77) and a fourth term from 1980 until she was assassinated in 1984.Indira 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 (Congress Party), 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 (“Mahatma”) 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.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 All legal cases against Indira, as well as against Sanjay, were withdrawn.Sanjay Gandhi’s death in an airplane crash in June 1980 eliminated Indira’s chosen successor from the political leadership of India.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.

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