Indira Gandhi was the only daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister.

Her association with politics started from her childhood. She was born on 19th of November, 1917 in Allahabad. Her maiden name was Indira Priyadarshini. After her marriage, her name became Indira Gandhi. She had her earlier education at Delhi and school education at Bombay (Mumbai). After passing her matriculation she studied for some time at Shantiniketan and later she went to England for higher education. She married Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi gentleman and gave birth two sons, Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi. Being the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru and having close association with Mahatma Gandhi, she could not avoid entering politics. She became an active member of the Congress in 1942 and participated in the Quit India Movement. She was jailed for the. After the death of Kamala Nehru, her mother, Indira Gandhi had to spend most of her time with her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. Feroze Gandhi, her husband, was a good parliamentarian and he died young. This in a way made Indira Gandhi to spend her whole time in politics. As a leader of Congress she organized the womens wing of the Indian National Congress. She was elected as President of the Indian National Congress in 1964. Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964 and Lal Bahadur shastris cabinet and was in charge of Information and Broadcasting. In 1966 when Sri Shastri died, Indira Gandhi was elected as the Prime Minister. She was the first women top become the Prime Minister of our country. She held this post of Prime Minister from 1966 to 1975 in the first spell. During this period she took many bold decisions with great courage and firmness. She waged a decisive war against Pakistan in 1971 and gave them a crushing defeat. She nationalized banks. She also abolished the Privy Purses, paid till then to former rules of princely States. In 1975 the Allahabad High Court delivered a judgment declaring her election to parliament as invalid. This was great blow to Indira Gandhi. She took a decision to declare emergency in the country and save herself. This was an ill-advised decision. All the opposition parties protested against the ill-deeds, carried on by Government in the name of emergency. Indira Gandhi was forced

to face an election. She lost the election and her party also fared very badly. The Janata government came to power under the leadership of Morarji Desai. The Janata Government did not last the full term. Its internal conflicts resulted in another election in 1980, which return Congress to power and Indira Gandhi became once again the Prime Minister for the second spell. During her second term as Prime Minister, she avoided the mistakes she committed during emergency. She introduced the slogan Garibi Hatavo and introduced her 20 point program to benefit the common man and the poor. She was able to win the hearts of the poor, the Harijans and Girijans once again. But a terrorist movement started in Punjab. The operation called Blue Star; made Indira Gandhi an enemy of Sikhs and her life was threatened. She was very firm in her decisions and proved staff on 31st October, 1984. This day is being observed as National Unity Day. She was awarded Bharat Ratna for her illustrious service to our country.

Indira Gandhi, ne Indira Priyadarshini Nehru (1917-1984), was born on November 19, 1917, in Allahabad, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. A graduate of Visva-Bharati University, Bengal, she also studied at the University of Oxford, England. In 1938 she joined the National Congress party and became active in India's independence movement. In 1942 she married Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi lawyer also active in the party. Shortly after, both were arrested by the British on charges of subversion and spent 13 months in prison. When India won its independence in 1947 and Nehru took office as prime minister, Gandhi became his official hostess. (Her mother had died in 1936.) She also served as his confidante on national problems and accompanied him on foreign trips.

In 1955 she was elected to the executive body of the Congress party, becoming a national political figure in her own right; in 1959 she became president of the party for one year. In 1962, during the Chinese-Indian border war, she coordinated civil defense activities. Following the death of her father in May 1964, Gandhi became minister of information and broadcasting in Lal Bahadur Shastri's government. In this post she extended broadcasting time, liberalized censorship policies, and approved a television education project in family planning. When Shastri died suddenly in January 1966, Gandhi succeeded him as prime minister. The following year she was elected to a 5-year term by the parliament members of the dominant Congress party. She led her party to a landslide victory in the national elections of 1971. In 1975 Gandhi was convicted of a minor infraction of the election laws during the 1971 campaign. Maintaining innocence, she charged that the conviction was part of an attempt to remove her from office and, instead of resigning, declared a national state of emergency on June 26. Although her conviction was soon overturned by the Indian Supreme Court, the emergency was continued. Gandhi placed many aspects of life in India under her strict control, and thousands of dissenters were imprisoned. Many saw in these actions the influence of her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, a political neophyte on whom she relied more and more for assistance. Hoping to demonstrate popular support for her regime, which critics contended was undermining India's democratic system, Gandhi called a general election in March 1977; She lost her seat in parliament, and the Congress party was defeated. In the elections of January 1980, however, she made a spectacular

comeback and was able to form a new majority government. When Sanjay died in a plane crash that June, she began grooming her older son, Rajiv Gandhi, as her successor. On October 31, 1984, after she had moved vigorously to suppress Sikh insurgents, she was shot to death by Sikh members of her security guard.