Born Indira Nehru in Allahabad, India, to a Kashmiri Pandit family. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, played a pivotal role in India’s struggle for independence from Britain and later became its first Prime Minister. In her early years, she was homeschooled, and in her youth, she learned in various institutes in Switzerland.
After graduation, she attended the Vishwa Bharati in Santiniketan for a year before moving to the UK to study history, political science, and economics at the University of Oxford. In 1940, while in Switzerland for medical treatment, Nazi Germany rapidly conquered Europe, and Gandhi escaped to India. Two years later, she married the freedom fighter Feroze Gandhi, whom she met a couple of years earlier in England. Their marriage lasted until 1960 when he died of a heart attack. They had two boys, Sanjay and Rajiv.
In 1947, Gandhi’s father became India’s first prime minister, and she served as his hostess instead of her mother, who died ten years earlier. In this position, she learned the fine details of diplomacy and political relationships. In 1955, at the age of 38, Gandhi, who was already a member of her father’s Congress Party, became a member of its working committee, and in 1959 she was appointed as the party’s president.
In 1964, following her father’s death, 47 years old Gandhi was elected to the Rajya Sabha – the upper chamber of the Indian parliament and was nominated the minister of information and broadcasting. Two years later, the serving Prime minister had died suddenly, and Gandhi was elected as the leader of the Congress Party, thus becoming the 3rd Prime minister and the first woman in India to serve in this position. She succeeded in maintaining the title by a narrow win in the elections of 1967.
With little support from the Congress Party, Gandhi nationalized the banks, and the elders of the Congress Party tried to force her out of her role as the party leader and prime minister. In response, she formed a new division within the party, having most Congress ministers on her side. The popularity of the New Congress Party guaranteed their win in the 1971 elections.
As prime minister, Gandhi led India to numerous national achievements, including the Green Revolution, in which the government adopted modern agriculture technologies that turned India into an industrial system. That solved the chronic food shortages in India and eventually even led to a surplus of grains. She chose a peaceful solution to end the violent conflict between East and West Pakistan and was the first government leader to recognize the newly formed country of Bangladesh.
Alongside her accomplishments, she was criticized for her authoritarian methods and government corruption. In 1975, she was found guilty of dishonest election practices and using government resources for party purposes. Her response was to declare a state of emergency throughout the country, imprisoning thousands of her political opponents and forming new laws and policies that limited the personal freedom of the citizens. After two years of emergency rule, she has lost the 1977 election and went to jail for her charges. Within only one year, she won a seat at the Lok Sabha – the lower chamber of the Indian parliament, and in 1980, she became prime minister. In that same year, her oldest son, who served as her chief political adviser, died in an airplane crash, and she began to prepare her second son, Rajiv, for the party’s leadership.
During the early 1980s, various nationalistic groups demanded independence from India’s central government, in particular Sikh separatists, which used a violent approach to receive their demands. In June 1984, Gandhi ordered the army to attack the separatists who occupied and fortified the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar, which resulted in the death of hundreds of Sikhs. A few months later, two of her Sikh bodyguards shot and killed her. She was 67 years old.
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