Indira Gandhi

The third Prime Minister of India, and the first woman to hold the office.

She was born at Allahabad on the nineteenth of November 1917, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru. Her surname came from her husband Feroze and not from Mohandas Gandhi, to whom she was no relation. She grew up in a house where the men were repeatedly in prison and the movement met in the drawing room.

She was Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until she was killed. She took India into the war that made Bangladesh, oversaw the first nuclear test, and in 1975 declared a state of emergency that suspended elections and civil liberties for twenty-one months - for which the country voted her out, and then, three years later, voted her back.

In June 1984 she ordered the army into the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the holiest place in Sikhism, to remove an armed separatist movement that had fortified it. Hundreds were killed, many of them pilgrims. She was warned to remove her Sikh bodyguards afterwards and refused, saying it would make a lie of everything she had said about a secular India.

On the morning of the thirty-first of October 1984 she walked from her house to her office through the garden, on her way to an interview with Peter Ustinov. Two of her own guards were at the wicket gate. She said good morning to them. They shot her twenty-nine times.

Her son Rajiv, who succeeded her and was himself assassinated seven years later, and her daughter-in-law Sonia and grandchildren.