**Sanitized Transcript:**

Today’s protagonist was one of the key players on the giant chessboard that was Asia at the height of the Cold War. Born into a political family, she rose through India’s political system until she became the first and only female Prime Minister of her country. Her name was Indira Gandhi. In one of her speeches, she advised her followers to maintain a ‘bias toward action’ to encourage societal change, even if it required painstakingly small steps. Her life was definitely true to that principle: as the second longest-running Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Gandhi won a war, oversaw the birth of a new state, broke the traditional non-aligned stance of India, and even made her country a nuclear superpower. However, it was her internal policies that made her mandate controversial and eventually turned her into a target of hatred. Welcome to today’s Biographics, in which we will look at the private and public life of Indira Gandhi and how it all led to a fateful appointment with the very people who were meant to protect her.

Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru on November 19th, 1917, in Allahabad, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. She was the first-born child of Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru, who were no ordinary family. Kamala came from a conservative family of Kashmiri Brahmins, a category of priests and teachers according to the traditional Indian caste system. This initially shy girl became an independence activist after meeting her future husband, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was a well-educated lawyer and one of the most active members of the Indian Independence Movement, fighting for self-rule against the British Empire. As such, he was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and would later serve as the first Prime Minister of an independent India. While Nehru and Gandhi’s fight for independence through non-cooperation is widely known, Kamala’s role may have been overlooked. Beginning in 1921, Kamala was actively involved in the Non-Cooperation movement, organizing boycotts and picketing lines against shops selling British goods. When her husband was jailed by the colonial authorities, Kamala shed her natural shyness to deliver speeches to thousands of followers on his behalf. With such fierce examples set by both her parents, it is no wonder that little Indira wanted to join the active struggle as early as possible. At age five, she carried out her first act of rebellion: she sacrificed her beloved doll made in England by throwing it onto a bonfire of imported British goods.

Two years later, in 1924, the Nehru family welcomed a second child, a boy, also born in November. Unfortunately, the newborn died after only two days, and Indira grew up as an only child. In 1929, she escalated her commitment to the cause of self-determination. As a girl of only 12, Indira became a leader within an organization numbering 60,000 young revolutionaries called Vanar Sena, or ‘Monkey Brigade’. This name was inspired by the traditional epic Ramayana, in which an army of monkeys helps Prince Rama to defeat the despotic and monstrous Ravana. The Vanar Sena’s mission was less bellicose but still dangerous, as it involved managing the communications and logistics that powered mass demonstrations and protests.

In March 1930, Indira and Kamala were participating in one such protest outside Ewing Christian College in Allahabad. Indira’s mother suddenly collapsed due to a heat stroke. An eighteen-year-old student of the College rushed to her aid. His name was Feroz Gandhi—no relation to the Mahatma. This chance encounter would prove one of the most important for Indira’s life so far. Feroz became a good friend of both Indira and her mother, even helping to look after Kamala when she later contracted tuberculosis. By 1936, Kamala moved to Switzerland to treat her tuberculosis, but this was in vain: she passed away on February 28, 1936, while her husband was in prison. Shortly after her mother’s death, Indira traveled to Britain to enroll at Somerville College in Oxford to complete her studies. She never attained a degree, though, as her concentration may have been swayed by a big distraction, one that happened to be studying at the nearby London School of Economics: Feroz Gandhi.

Indira and Feroz rekindled their friendship, which turned into a courtship and then into an engagement. Like Indira, Feroz was also well-educated, involved in the independence movement, and he loved Indira. Despite all this, his potential father-in-law Nehru objected to the union. Nehru simply had a personal dislike of the young Gandhi, and as father of the bride, he was entitled to a powerful opinion. As the Nehrus were a family under the spotlight, many ordinary citizens also criticized the engagement, on the basis that he was a Parsi, not a Hindu like Indira, or that non-arranged marriages were not the norm. In fact, there was such a public outcry against the match that the other Gandhi, the Mahatma, had to offer a public statement of support, which included the request: “I invite the writers of abusive letters to shed your wrath and bless the forthcoming marriage.” Despite the objections and the abuse, Indira taught everybody a lesson in determination by marrying Feroz on March 26, 1942. Two years later, Indira gave birth to her first son Rajiv, followed in 1946 by Sanjay. Unfortunately, this marriage was not a happy one. Feroz began having extramarital affairs almost immediately.

Things only got worse after August 15, 1947. This is the date on which Nehru became the first Prime Minister of an independent India, to which he added the title of Foreign Minister in October of the same year. In this capacity, Nehru handled the first of many crises over Kashmir, a border region disputed with Pakistan. As work kept piling up on Nehru’s desk, he enlisted his daughter Indira to help as his personal assistant. This was an unofficial role, although it became apparent to him and to the leadership of his party—the Indian National Congress (INC)—that Indira’s contribution was key to carrying out his functions. Indira was spending more and more time with her father’s cabinet, eventually moving away from her hometown of Allahabad to the capital, Delhi. Her two sons followed her, while Feroz decided to stay back to concentrate on his work editing ‘The National Herald’… but this arrangement also gave him free rein to pursue more clandestine liaisons. During this de facto separation, Indira appeared to be completely absorbed by her ministerial and political duties.

Despite their marital issues, the Gandhis presented a united front in the arena of Indian politics. During the Parliamentary Elections in 1951-52, Indira became the campaign manager for Feroz. Indira clearly had a knack for campaigning and succeeded in securing a victory for her husband. After starting to serve as an MP, Feroz had to move to Delhi, but he did not join his family, preferring to live in a separate house. From then on, both Gandhis made their bid to grow in status within the ruling party, the Indian National Congress, although admittedly in two very different fashions. Feroz did so by exposing the corruption within his father-in-law’s government. He exposed a major scandal involving bribes paid by prominent insurance companies to the Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari. Because of this, Feroz began to emerge as the new rising star within India’s political circles. On the other hand, Indira was following another route, rising from the inside of the INC party’s structure. In 1955, Indira first became a member, and then a president, of the working committee of the Indian National Congress—the inner circle that decided the party’s policies.

In 1958, Feroz suffered a heart attack during a state visit to Bhutan. Indira rushed him back to Delhi and took care of him for the following year. She still managed to advance her career within the party, and in 1959, Indira became President of the Indian National Congress. Marred by poor health, Feroz could not match her rise. On September 8, 1960, he suffered another cardiac arrest. This time, it was fatal. The marriage of Indira and Feroz had not been the happiest. In addition to affairs and long periods of separation, their life was marred by frequent, vicious arguments. According to Indira’s biographer Sagarika Ghose, this was because both were extreme individualists, with an urge to dominate the other. And yet Indira remembered those confrontations with fondness: “I like to think that those quarrels enlivened our life, because without them, we would have had a normal life but banal and boring. We didn’t deserve a normal banal and boring life.”

Shortly after the death of Indira’s husband, her father’s health began declining. It did not help that in July 1962, India and China entered a war over some border disputes, which ended with a Chinese victory in November. Nehru’s condition worsened, leading to his death on May 27, 1964. Nehru was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who appointed Indira as Minister of Information and Broadcasting. As a Minister, Indira proved very adept at building her image with well-planned publicity stunts, such as the one taking place during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. This confrontation over the control of the Kashmir border region took place from August 5 to September 22, 1965, when a UN resolution finally imposed a ceasefire. That summer, Indira planned a holiday retreat at Srinagar, in Kashmir. Despite repeated warnings by the security forces that Pakistani troops had advanced very close to her hotel, Indira Gandhi refused to move. The incident garnered her huge national and international media attention.

It would take only a few months for Indira to take a role at the center of the stage. On January 11, 1966, Prime Minister Shastri died. Immediately, his fellow party members began squabbling and plotting to appoint a successor. The leadership of the Indian National Congress was by then split into two currents, one more conservative, the other with socialist leanings. These divisions made them unable to settle on a candidate, and so they started considering an appointment for Indira Gandhi. They had been led to believe that she was a goongi Gudiya, or ‘dumb doll’, easily manipulated—the perfect compromise candidate, then! After much deliberation, Indira was chosen as the Prime Ministerial candidate by the Congress high command. Indira campaigned hard and emerged victorious on January 24, 1966. At the age of 49, Indira Gandhi had become the Prime Minister of one of the largest and most populous countries on Earth.

When Mrs. Gandhi was elected, the INC party was split into two opposing factions. Of the two, Indira sided with the socialist-leaning one. The INC was further weakened when new parliamentary elections took place in 1967, and the party lost 60 seats in the lower house. In normal situations, this landslide defeat would spell the fall of the cabinet in charge. But the person in charge of the cabinet was not your normal Prime Minister. Indira Gandhi proved that her tenacity to cling to power was unparalleled. In order to ensure the survival of her government, Mrs. Gandhi went as far as forging a coalition with the Socialist and Communist Parties, something unthinkable a few years earlier during her father Jawaharlal’s term in office.

Domestically, in 1969, Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet nationalized the fourteen largest banks in India, as well as the four most important oil companies. Other reforms included the abolition of privileges for the Maharajas, who still held power in several of India’s states. Finally, Mrs. Gandhi initiated an agricultural reform based on the Green Revolution concepts developed by US Scientist Norman Borlaug: a combination of mechanized agriculture and development of new breeds of high-yield plants. Thanks to Gandhi’s reforms, India, normally beset by periodic famines, became an exporter of surplus rice and wheat. As far as foreign policy goes, Indira Gandhi’s time in office was marked by tension and outright hostility toward China, Pakistan, and the US. At the same time, India signed a Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1971, marking a further drift away from equidistant non-alignment and towards the Socialist Bloc.

The enmity with China dated back from the 1962 war and was exacerbated by Beijing’s nuclear tests in 1967. The shadow of this atomic threat prompted Gandhi to start pursuing India’s own nuclear program. Within just seven years, the country was able to perform its first underground detonation. The rivalry with Pakistan over Kashmir was as old as India’s independence and had already resulted in two border wars. The two countries were about to enter a further conflict in 1971. At that time, Pakistan was split into two separate territories, East and West Pakistan, separated by Northern India. Islamabad’s armed forces launched a violent counter-insurgency campaign in the Eastern half to suppress the Awami League, an independence movement. The result of this internal struggle was that about 10 million East Pakistani citizens fled into India as refugees.

The unprecedented humanitarian crisis stretched India’s resources to the limit, prompting Indira Gandhi to harshly condemn the repression on March 31. Soon, she started doing something more than just speaking sternly—Indira started supporting the Awami League in their independence fight. This was effectively a war by proxy against Pakistan, a calculated move to weaken the hostile neighbor and create a friendlier government on the northeastern border. Toward the end of the year, this local conflict took on regional, then international connotations. To put it simply: Pakistan did not like India. China did not like India. So, China supported Pakistan. Enter a new player: the US. China and the Soviet Union were not best pals anymore, so Nixon sought a rapprochement with Mao. Therefore, the US liked China, who liked Pakistan. The US planned to help Pakistan should India declare war.

In December of 1971, the conflict by proxy against Pakistan became a full-fledged war. On December 3, Pakistan decided to retaliate against India’s involvement with the Awami League by bombing Indian airfields in the western regions of Punjab and Kashmir. The Indian government under Indira Gandhi had proven able to take quick, decisive actions, and the military was no different. The Indian air force retaliated on December 4 and quickly achieved air superiority. On the ground, the Army launched a quick attack into East Pakistan, converging on the regional capital, Dhaka. On December 9, the war risked escalating beyond the Indian subcontinent when Nixon ordered for a US fleet to head toward the theater of action. By December 16, Dhaka had fallen to the Indian Army and the separatist forces of the Awami League. The Indian victory in the third war with Pakistan was a personal triumph for Indira Gandhi and resulted in the birth of a new nation: East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh.

The 1970s had begun well for Mrs. Gandhi, and she would soon score another triumph. In 1972, the INC faced the Socialist Party in national parliamentary elections. Gandhi’s party triumphed in the ballot boxes, thanks to the recent victory over Pakistan and to her campaign promise to eradicate poverty. The defeated Socialist leader, Raj Narain, raised allegations of corruption and electoral malpractice. Soon, Socialist and other opposition parties took to the streets, protesting against Gandhi’s government. As the decade progressed, Gandhi’s economic and social reforms were largely nullified by rising inflation and a generally poor state of the economy. All this only played into the hands of protesters. Narain’s charges were formalized with the High Court in Allahabad, which in June of 1975 ruled against the Prime Minister. Now Indira Gandhi was constitutionally expected to step down from office. But she had already made it clear once: she wasn’t going to be pressured by anybody.

As unrest spread throughout the country following the court ruling, Mrs. Gandhi took this as the perfect occasion to declare a state of emergency, giving her extraordinary powers to rule by decree. The period of emergency rule lasted two years and would be a dark moment for Indian democracy. The country became a dictatorship in all but name: as an authoritarian ruler, Indira Gandhi ordered political opponents and other activists to be jailed, and press freedom to be limited. Indira’s main accomplice and confidante was her second-born son, Sanjay. Taking advantage of extraordinary powers, Sanjay put into practice some pet projects of his: first, the forced removal of slum dwellings. More importantly, India enacted population control via forced sterilization. This measure was considered a necessary evil to allow for the country to prosper. Indira’s government launched a campaign of vasectomies, starting with public employees: they were required to undergo sterilization to receive their salaries. The campaign was then extended to any male citizen, who would be offered cash, or even just cooking oil, as an incentive to accept a vasectomy.

At the beginning of 1977, Indira Gandhi put an end to the state of emergency by calling for new elections. The Prime Minister thought that all opposition had been effectively suppressed, and this would have been an easy win, one to legitimize her permanence in office. But the elections resulted in a crushing defeat for the INC: they lost almost 200 seats compared to the previous legislature. The big winner this time was the Janata Dal, or ‘People’s Party’, a coalition of several smaller parties. Indira accepted defeat and stepped down.

Mrs. Gandhi may have left office as Prime Minister, but she still held a seat in Parliament, from which she led the opposition against the Janata Dal. The new government tried to remove her by having her jailed briefly twice: in October of 1977, and then again in December of 1978. In both occasions, the charges were corruption. But the plan did not work. As the tenuous alliance within the Janata started to crumble, the electorate called for stability—something that Indira and the INC could guarantee. New elections were called in January 1980, and Mrs. Gandhi made a surprising comeback as head of the Government. During the same elections, Indira’s son Sanjay won a seat in Parliament. By May, Mrs. Gandhi made it clear that he was her heir apparent by appointing him as secretary-general of the INC.

Sanjay’s rise had to stop abruptly on June 23, 1980. For years, Sanjay had been practicing with some success in the sport of aircraft aerobatics. That day, too, Sanjay had gone out flying. But while performing aerial loops, he lost control and crashed with his plane, dying on the spot. Older brother Rajiv also had a passion for flying; until then