Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi was an Indian politician and stateswoman whose 16-year service across two terms as the third Prime Minister of India (1966–1977 and 1980–1984) — making her the first and only female Prime Minister of India and one of the most-influential 20th-century South Asian heads of government. She was born Indira Priyadarshini Nehru on November 19, 1917, in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, British India. Her father Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India (1947–1964) and her mother Kamala Nehru was an Indian-independence-movement activist. (She was unrelated to Indian-independence-movement leader Mahatma Gandhi — her surname Gandhi was acquired through her 1942 marriage to Indian-independence-movement activist Feroze Gandhi.)

Her education at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan (1934–1935) and at Somerville College, Oxford (1937–1941; without earning a degree, due to her mother's 1936 death from tuberculosis and her own ill health) launched her early-career path. Her 1942 marriage to Feroze Gandhi — and her subsequent 1942–1945 Indian National Congress political activism (including her 1942 Quit India Movement imprisonment) — launched her early-career Indian-political-movement engagement.

Her 1947–1964 service as the personal secretary and political confidante of her father Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — across the 17 years of her father's Indian Prime Minister service — produced her late-1950s and early-1960s national-political profile. Her 1964 election as Indian Minister of Information and Broadcasting under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri produced her January 19, 1966 election as the third Prime Minister of India following Shastri's January 11, 1966 sudden death.

Her 1966–1977 first Prime Minister term — across the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War (which produced the December 1971 founding of independent Bangladesh from East Pakistan), the 1974 Smiling Buddha nuclear weapons test (which made India the sixth nuclear weapons state), and the 1975–1977 Emergency Period (during which she suspended Indian constitutional rights and imposed authoritarian rule) — produced her 1970s Indian-political public profile. The 1977 Janata Party general-election defeat preceded her 1980 second-term Prime Minister election. Her June 1984 Operation Blue Star — the Indian Army assault on the Sikh-pilgrimage Golden Temple in Amritsar — produced her October 31, 1984 assassination by her own two Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh in retaliation for the Operation Blue Star order.

Her name Indira derives from the Sanskrit Indrani — an alternative name for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. Indira has been climbing in American naming since the 1970s.