Indira Gandhi

Background

Daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, she was the first woman to hold the position of head of the Indian government. She had the surname of her husband Feroze Gandhi, who had changed his surname for political reasons.

A brilliant politician, strategist, and thinker, she possessed great political ambition. As a woman and occupying the highest government position in a very patriarchal society, Indira was expected to be a leader of little importance, but her actions proved otherwise. She joined the Indian National Congress Party in 1939 and spent more than a year in prison for wartime activities. Her early years in politics were dedicated to helping her father, Nehru, Prime Minister, serving as President of Congress from 1959 to 1960. She became Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the cabinet of Lal Bahadur Shastri, and in 1966, after his death, she was chosen to succeed him as prime minister, after a brief interim exercised by Gulzarilal Nanda.

During the following years, she was engaged in a prolonged feud with the old leadership of Congress, but she defeated them with the help of the left-wing, between 1969 and 1970. As Prime Minister, Indira carefully used the instruments at her disposal to consolidate her power and authority. Using her power of appointments, she created notoriously weak cabinets. She created her own Congress party, after the November 1969 split into the Indian National Congress party. Re-elected in 1971, after a fierce campaign along the lines of her well-known socialist platform with the famous slogan — “garibi hatao” or “expel poverty” — she managed to improve the fortunes of her government with the successes of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War against her neighbor. Pakistan, supported by the United States of America, in East Bengal, where Indian intervention allowed local separatists to cap their nine-month war of independence with the creation of an independent republic, Bangladesh.