Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi was India's first and only woman prime minister, holding office from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. Born in Allahabad in 1917, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru and no relation to Mohandas Gandhi, she grew up inside the independence movement, was educated partly in Switzerland and at Oxford, and served as her father's official hostess and political confidante during his premiership. Congress leaders chose her to succeed Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966 expecting her to be manageable, and she was not. She split the party in 1969, nationalised fourteen major banks that year, and abolished the privy purses of the former princes in 1971, campaigning on the slogan garibi hatao — abolish poverty. Her defining success was the 1971 war. When Pakistan's crackdown in East Pakistan drove ten million refugees into India, she signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, waited out the international pressure, and intervened in December; the war lasted thirteen days and produced Bangladesh. India tested a nuclear device in 1974. She also presided over the Green Revolution's expansion, which ended dependence on imported grain. Convicted of electoral malpractice in June 1975 and ordered to vacate her seat, she declared a state of emergency instead. For twenty-one months she ruled by decree, jailed tens of thousands of opponents, censored the press, and allowed a mass sterilisation campaign directed by her son Sanjay. She called elections in 1977 and lost heavily, then returned in 1980. In June 1984 she ordered the army into the Golden Temple at Amritsar to remove armed Sikh militants; four months later two of her Sikh bodyguards shot her dead.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1984 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: prime_minister
