Indira Gandhi was born into a family that would define modern India, yet her early years were marked by profound isolation and the shadow of a father who was often absent. On the 19th of November 1917, she entered the world in Allahabad as Indira Nehru, the only surviving child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the future first Prime Minister of independent India, and Kamala Nehru. Her childhood was lonely and unhappy, shaped by her father's constant political struggles and imprisonment, and her mother's long battle with tuberculosis that ended in an early death. While other children played, Indira was taught mostly at home by tutors and attended school intermittently, her education interrupted by her mother's declining health. She moved through a series of schools in India and Europe, including the International School of Geneva and the Ecole Nouvelle in Switzerland, before settling at the University of Oxford in 1937. Her time at Oxford was fraught with difficulty; she failed her Latin entrance exam twice and struggled with ill health that required repeated trips to Switzerland for recovery. She never completed her degree, leaving England in 1941 to return to India, though the university later awarded her an honorary degree. During her time in Europe, she met Feroze Gandhi, a Zoroastrian from Gujarat, and they married in 1942 in Allahabad according to Adi Dharm rituals. The couple had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but the political turmoil of the time soon pulled Indira back into the heart of the struggle for independence. In September 1942, she was arrested for her role in the Quit India Movement and spent time in jail, an experience she later described as entering a world of mud and drabness from which the colors of freedom were a shocking relief. This early period forged a resilience that would define her political career, transforming a lonely child into a woman who would eventually command the world's largest democracy.
The Puppet Master's Undoing
When Indira Gandhi assumed the role of Prime Minister in January 1966, she was widely perceived by her own party elders as a 'Goongi goodiya,' or a dumb doll, to be easily manipulated. The Congress party bosses, led by K. Kamaraj, had orchestrated her election over her rival Morarji Desai precisely because they believed a woman would be a weak figurehead they could control. They expected her to be a figurehead while they pulled the strings, but Indira quickly proved them wrong. Her first major test came in 1967, when the Congress Party lost its majority in the Lok Sabha and power in several states due to economic stagnation and rising prices. Instead of retreating, she began to move towards socialist policies, challenging the party's traditional power structures. In 1969, she fell out with senior Congress leaders over the election of the President of India, supporting V. V. Giri against the official party candidate, and unilaterally nationalized fourteen of the largest banks in India without consulting the finance minister. These actions led to her expulsion from the party, but she floated her own faction, Congress (R), and retained power with the support of regional parties. The party split was a pivotal moment, transforming her from a perceived puppet into a dominant political force. She crushed the separatist Mizo National Front uprising in 1966 and later faced a military conflict with China in 1967, repelling Chinese attacks in the Himalayas and forcing their withdrawal. By the end of 1977, she had become such a dominating figure that Congress President D. K. Barooah coined the phrase 'India is Indira and Indira is India.' Her evolution from a reluctant successor to a leader with the iron resolve to split her own party and go to war with Pakistan marked the beginning of her legacy as one of the most powerful women in the world.