Indira Gandhi: Her leadership Divided The World's Largest Democracy

Indira Gandhi was a controversial leader who was twice the Prime Minister of India and whose long career ended with her murder at the hands of conspirators in 1984.
She was born on November 19 1917, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru (who would later himself become the first prime Minister of India) and was educated at Oxford in England. She became involved in India's independence movement by joining the National Congress Party in 1938. During World War 2, she was arrested by the British on charges of subversion and spent over a year in prison.
When India gained its independence in 1947, and her father became Prime Minister, she became his official hostess and unofficially his political confidante. In 1955 she became elected to the executive body of The Congress Party and began to establish herself as a political figure in her own right. By 1959, she was president of the party.
Following the death of her father in 1964 she became India's Minister of Information. In that office she promoted policies for family planning and maintained a liberal posture on censorship. When Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shasti died in 1966, she succeeded him. In 1967 she wins her first election to a five year term and does so again in a landslide in 1971.
In 1975 she begins to suffer political trouble when she is actually convicted of violating an election law during the campaign from 4 years before. She maintained her innocence and claimed that the move was an attempt on the part of her political rivals to remove her from power and reacted by declaring a state of emergency and began a crackdown on dissenters with imprisonment. In an effort to appease critics who were claiming that her actions were undermining Indian democracy, she called an election in 1977 which she lost and her party was beaten badly.
In early 1980 she makes an amazing political comeback and regains her office. That same year she lost one of her sons in a plane crash. During her term in the 1980's she began to surpress Sikh insergents who were active against her. On October 31 1984, she was shot to death by Sikh members of her own security guard. Her son Rajiv was then made Prime Minister. She had been grooming him to succeed her for years.