January 19, 1966 - Indira Gandhi - a podcast by Stephen Hammond

woman prime minister. Indira Gandhi was born into a political family. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India’s first prime minister, following independence from British rule in 1947. She was schooled in West Bengal and Oxford, and married Feroze Gandhi, a lawyer who rose to prominence in Indian politics before his death in 1960. Like her father, her husband and the most famous of Indians, Mohandas Ghandi (no relation), she was always actively involved in the Congress Party. When India’s prime minister died suddenly four days before the leadership contest, Gandhi put her name forward to lead the party. On January 19, 1966, she won the support of 355 of the Congress Party’s MPs, in sharp contrast to the 169 who supported former Finance Minister Morarji Desai. She became India’s first woman prime minister, leader of the largest democracy on Earth. Although she also won the general elections in 1967 and 1971, 1977 proved her first election loss. She’d just been convicted of corruption and creating a two-year state of emergency during which she imprisoned opponents and severely limited the media. In 1984, four years after returning to politics, she ordered the storming of the Sikh holy Golden Temple in order to arrest Punjab militants taking refuge inside. She paid for the decision with her life. Outraged about the damage done to their sacred temple, her two Sikh bodyguards killed her in November 1984.

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