Sonia Gandhi (Hindi: सोनिया गांधी) (born Edvige Antonia Albina Maino on 9 December 1946), is an Italian-born Indian politician, the President of the Indian National Congress and the widow of former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. She was the Chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance in the Lok Sabha, until she resigned on the 23rd of March 2006. She was named the third most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine in the year 2004. However, that ranking fell to number 13 by 2006. She was returned to Parliament by a margin of over 400,000 votes in the recently held by-election for Rae Bareilly.
Born to Stefano and Paola Maino, as Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, in Lusiana, a little village 50 km from Vicenza, Italy, she spent her adolescence in Orbassano, a town near Turin being raised in a Roman Catholic family and attending a Catholic school. Her father, a building contractor and former Fascist suporter, died in 1983. Her mother and two sisters still live around Orbassano.
In 1964, she went to study English at a language school in the city of Cambridge. While doing this certificate course she met Rajiv Gandhi, who was enrolled at the time in Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. They were married in 1968, after which she moved into the house of her mother-in-law and then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.

She initially disliked Indian food and clothes, and caused controversy when she was photographed wearing a miniskirt. It was not until 1983 that she acquired Indian citizenship. The couple had two children, Rahul Gandhi (born 1970) and Priyanka Gandhi (born 1972).
Despite the family's heavy involvement in politics (her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, was Prime Minister), Sonia and Rajiv avoided all involvement - Rajiv worked as an airline pilot, and Sonia took care of her family. When Indira was ousted from office in 1977 and when Rajiv entered politics in 1982, Sonia continued to focus on her family and avoided all contact with publicity.
During Rajiv Gandhi's five years in office the Bofors Scandal broke, and Ottavio Quattrocchi an Italian business man believed to be involved, was said to a friend of Sonia Gandhi and had access to the Prime Minister's official residence .

Following her husband's assassination on 21 May 1991, there were calls for her to enter politics by members of the Congress Party. After her refusal, the party settled on the choice of P V Narasimha Rao as leader and, subsequently, Prime Minister. She finally entered politics just before the 1998 national election. She officially took charge of the Congress party as its president in 1998 and was elected to parliament in the elections held in 1999. She was elected the Leader of the Opposition of the 13th Lok Sabha in 1999.
During her campaign, her opponents (mainly the Bharatiya Janata Party) played up her foreign birth, her failure to take Indian citizenship for 15 years after her wedding, and her lack of fluency in Hindi or any Indian language despite her claim that she had «become an Indian in her heart the day she became Indira Gandhi's daughter-in-law». In May 1999, Sonia Gandhi offered to resign from the Congress Party leadership after three senior leaders (Sharad Pawar, Purno A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar) challenged her right to try to become India's Prime Minister, given that she was not born of Indian blood or soil.
In the 2004 general elections, Sonia launched a nationwide campaign, criss-crossing the country on the Aam Aadmi (Ordinary people) slogan in contrast to the 'India Shining' slogan of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) alliance. After her party's victory, she was tipped to be the next Prime Minister of India. On May 16, she was unanimously chosen to lead a 15-party coalition government which was subsequently named the United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
Parliament was, however, badly fractured, and despite being the largest grouping of parties in India's parliament, the 15-party UPA was not able to secure a majority and had to depend on outside support from the Left Parties to form a government. After a storm of controversy over her foreign origin, Gandhi declined to the leadership of the Congress Parliamentary Party in the Lok Sabha, the position that would have indicated that she was the party's nominee for Prime Minister. Her supporters hailed this as an act of renunciation while her opponents attacked it as a political move in which the ultimate aim was to gain an absolute majority for the Congress Party in Parliament, subsequent to which she would become Prime Minister.
At the time, several members of the National Democratic Alliance - notably Subramaniam Swamy and Sushma Swaraj - claimed that there were legal reasons that barred her from the Prime Minister's post, and, indeed, from Parliament. They pointed, in particular, to Section 5 of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955, which they claimed implied «reciprocity». This was contested by others and eventually the suits were dismissed by the Supreme Court of India. The Supreme Court of India also dismissed an attempt to prosecute her for falsely claiming to have graduated from Cambridge University during the election.

On 18 May, a day before her scheduled inauguration, in a politically shrewd move (as her critics say) or reasonable one (per her supporters) to avoid the pain of another costly agitation and division of the nation based on ideology, she suggested economist Dr. Manmohan Singh for the Prime Minister's post. Dr. Singh had served as India's finance minister in a previous Congress party government headed by Rao, and is considered by many as the chief architect of India's economic reforms of the early 1990s. Moreover, the fact that he was not known to have any political ambitions and that he enjoyed a good rapport with Sonia Gandhi probably helped him to win the post. Sonia retained the post of the Leader of the Majority and the Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party. This arrangement enabled her to keep political control of the party and to deal with the political fire fights in the giant coalition government while leaving the management of the country in hands of Manmohan Singh.
Jyoti Basu, the former Communist chief minister of West Bengal who was deeply involved during the meeting to decide the PM, said after the meeting that her children feared for her life and she was therefore reluctant to become PM.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on 23 March 2006 announced her resignation from the Lok Sabha and also as chairperson of the National Advisory Council. According to Indian electoral law, an elected person cannot hold an office of profit (meaning paid posts). She was re-elected from her constituency Rae Bareilly in May 2006.

Despite her father's vehement opposition to her marriage to Rajiv, Sonia maintains close links with her family in Italy. Her son, Rahul Gandhi, was elected to Parliament for the Amethi constituency in 2004. Some consider him to be the natural heir to the reins of the party, and he has been tipped to become a Congress leader in the future. Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra has not stood for office, though she has worked as a Congress campaign manager. She, too, attracts media speculation. Sonia and her children are estranged from Maneka Gandhi, the widow of Rajiv's younger brother Sanjay Gandhi, and her son Varun Gandhi, who are both members of the opposition BJP.

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Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Hindi: इन्दिरा प्रियदर्शिनी गान्धी) (19 November 1917 - 31 October 1984) was Prime Minister of India from 19 January 1966 to 24 March 1977, and again from 14 January 1980 until her assassination on 31 October 1984. She was India's first and to date only female prime minister.
Daughter of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and mother of another, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi was one of India's most notable and controversial political leaders. In spite of her famous surname, she was of no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.

The Nehru family can trace their ancestry to the Brahmins of Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi. Indira's grandfather Motilal Nehru was a wealthy barrister of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. Nehru was one of the most prominent members of the Indian National Congress in pre-Gandhi times and would go on to author the Nehru Report, the people's choice for a future Indian system of government as opposed to the British system. Her father Jawaharlal Nehru was a well-educated lawyer and was a popular leader of the Indian Independence Movement. Indira Gandhi was born to his young wife Kamala; at this juncture, Nehru entered the independence movement with Mahatma Gandhi.
Growing up in the sole care of her mother, who was sick and alienated from the Nehru household, Gandhi developed strong protective instincts and a loner personality. Her grandfather and father continually being enmeshed in national politics also made mixing with her peers difficult. She had conflicts with her father's sisters, including Vijayalakshmi Pandit, and these continued into the political world.
Indira Gandhi created the Vanara Sena movement for young girls and boys which played a small but notable role in the Indian Independence Movement, conducting protests and flag marches, as well as helping Congress politicians circulate sensitive publications and banned materials. In an often-told story, she smuggled out from her father's police-watched house an important document in her schoolbag that outlined plans for a major revolutionary initiative in the early 1930s.
In 1934, her mother Kamala Nehru finally succumbed to tuberculosis after a long struggle. Indira Gandhi was 17 at the time and thus never experienced a stable family life during her childhood. She attended prominent Indian, European and British schools like Santiniketan and Oxford, but her weak academic performance prevented her from obtaining a degree. In her years in continental Europe and the UK, she met Feroze Gandhi, a young Parsee Congress activist, whom she married in 1942, just before the beginning of the Quit India Movement - the final, all-out national revolt launched by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party. The couple were arrested and detained for several months for their involvement in the movement. In 1944, Gandhi gave birth to Rajiv Gandhi, followed by Sanjay Gandhi two years later .
During the chaotic Partition of India in 1947, she helped organize refugee camps and provide medical care for the millions of refugees from Pakistan. This was her first exercise in major public service, and a valuable experience for the tumult of the coming years.
The couple later settled in Allahabad where Feroze worked for a Congress Party newspaper and an insurance company. Their marriage started out well, but deteriorated later as Gandhi moved to Delhi to be at the side of her father, now the Prime Minister, who was living alone in a high-pressure environment. She became his confidante, secretary and nurse. Her sons lived with her, but she eventually became permanently separated from Feroze, though they remained married.
When India's first general election approached in 1952, Gandhi managed the campaigns of both Nehru and her husband, who was contesting the constituency of Rae Bareilly. Feroze had not consulted Nehru on his choice to run, and even though he was elected, he opted to live in a separate house in Delhi. Feroze quickly developed a reputation for being a fighter against corruption by exposing a major scandal in the nationalized insurance industry, resulting in the resignation of the Finance Minister, a Nehru aide.
At the height of the tension, Gandhi and her husband separated. However, in 1957, shortly after re-election, Feroze suffered a heart attack, which dramatically healed their broken marriage. At his side to help him recuperate in Kashmir, their family grew closer. But Feroze died on September 8, 1960, while she was abroad with Nehru on a foreign visit.

During 1959 and 1960, Gandhi ran for and was elected the President of the Indian National Congress. Her term of office was uneventful. She also acted as her father's chief of staff. Nehru was known as a vocal opponent of nepotism, and she did not contest a seat in the 1962 elections.
Nehru died on May 24, 1964, and Gandhi, at the urgings of the new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, contested elections and joined the Government, being immediately appointed Minister for Information and Broadcasting. She went to Madras when the riots over Hindi becoming the national language broke out in non-Hindi speaking states of the south. There she spoke to government officials, soothed the anger of community leaders and supervised reconstruction efforts for the affected areas. Shastri and senior Ministers were embarrassed, owing to their lack of such initiative. Minister Gandhi's actions were probably not directly aimed at Shastri or her own political elevation. She reportedly lacked interest in the day-to-day functioning of her Ministry, but was media-savvy and adept at the art of politics and image-making.
When the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 broke out, Gandhi was vacationing in the border region of Srinagar. Although warned by the Army that Pakistani insurgents had penetrated very close to the city, she refused to relocate to Jammu or Delhi. She rallied local government and welcomed media attention, in effect reassuring the nation. Shastri died in Tashkent, hours after signing the peace agreement with Pakistan's Ayub Khan, mediated by the Soviets.
Shastri had been a candidate of consensus, bridging the left-right gap and staving off the popular conservative Morarji Desai. Gandhi was the candidate of the 'Syndicate', regional power brokers of immense influence, who thought that she would be easily led. Searching for explanations for this disastrous miscalculation many years later, the then Congress President Kumaraswami Kamaraj made the strange claim that he had made a personal vow to Nehru to make Gandhi Prime Minister 'at any cost'. At the time, however, he and others had dismissed her as a gungi gudiya - literally, a 'dumb doll'.
With the backing of the Syndicate, in a vote of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Gandhi beat Morarji Desai by 355 votes to 169 to become the third Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that position.

During the 1971 War, the US had sent its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal as a warning to India not to use the genocide in East Pakistan as a pretext to launch a wider attack against West Pakistan, especially over the disputed territory of Kashmir. This move had further alienated India from the First World, and Prime Minister Gandhi now accelerated a previously cautious new direction in national security and foreign policy. India and the USSR had earlier signed the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Cooperation, the resulting political and military support contributing substantially to India's victory in the 1971 war.
But Gandhi now accelerated the national nuclear program, as it was felt that the nuclear threat from China and the intrusive interest of the two major superpowers were not conducive to India's stability and security. She also invited the new Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Shimla for a week-long summit. After the near-failure of the talks, the two heads of state eventually signed the Shimla Agreement, which bound the two countries to resolve the Kashmir dispute by negotiations and peaceful means. It was Gandhi's stubbornness which made even the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister sign the accord according to India's terms in which Zulfikar Bhutto had to write the last few terms in the agreement in his own handwriting.
Indira Gandhi was heavily criticized for not extracting the Pakistan-occupied portion of Kashmir from a humiliated Pakistan, whose 93,000 prisoners of war were under Indian control. But the agreement did remove immediate United Nations and third party interference, and greatly reduced the likelihood of Pakistan launching a major attack in the near future. By not demanding total capitulation on a sensitive issue from Bhutto, she had allowed Pakistan to stabilize and normalize. Trade relations were also normalized, though much contact remained frozen for years.
In 1974, India successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, unofficially codenamed Smiling Buddha, near the desert village of Pokhran in Rajasthan. Describing the test as for "peaceful purposes", India nevertheless became the world's youngest nuclear power.
Innovative agricultural programs and additional government support launched in the 1960s had finally resulted in India's chronic food shortages gradually being transformed into surpluses of wheat, rice, cotton and milk. The country became a food exporter, and diversified its commercial crop production as well, in what has become known as the Green Revolution. At the same time, the White Revolution was an expansion of milk production to combat malnutrition, especially amidst young children.

Gandhi's government faced major problems after her tremendous mandate of 1971. The internal structure of the Congress Party had withered following its numerous splits, leaving it entirely dependent on her leadership for its election fortunes. The Green Revolution was transforming the lives of India's vast underclasses, but not with the speed or in the manner promised under Garibi Hatao. Job growth was not strong enough to curb the widespread unemployment that followed the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the OPEC oil shocks.
Gandhi had already been accused of tendencies towards authoritarianism. Using her strong parliamentary majority, she had amended the Constitution and stripped power from the states granted under the federal system. The Central government had twice imposed President's Rule under Article 356 of the Constitution by deeming states ruled by opposition parties as "lawless and chaotic", thus winning administrative control of those states. Elected officials and the administrative services resented the growing influence of Sanjay Gandhi, who had become Gandhi's close political advisor at the expense of men like P.N. Haksar, Gandhi's chosen strategist during her rise to power. Renowned public figures and former freedom-fighters like Jaya Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Acharya Jivatram Kripalani now toured the North, speaking actively against her Government.
In June 1975 the High Court of Allahabad found the sitting Prime Minister guilty of employing a government servant in her election campaign and Congress Party work. Technically, this constituted election fraud, and the court thus ordered her to be removed from her seat in Parliament and banned from running in elections for six years.
Gandhi appealed the decision; the opposition parties rallied en masse, calling for her resignation. Strikes by unions and protest rallies paralyzed life in many states. J.P. Narayan's Janata coalition even called upon the police to disobey orders if asked to fire on an unarmed public. Public disenchantment combined with hard economic times and an unresponsive government. A huge rally surrounded the Parliament building and Gandhi's residence in Delhi, demanding her to behave responsibly and resign.
Prime Minister Gandhi advised President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a state of emergency, claiming that the strikes and rallies were creating a state of 'internal disturbance'. Ahmed was an old political ally, and in India the President acts upon the advice of an elected Prime Minister alone. Accordingly, a State of Emergency because of internal disorder, under Article 352 of the Constitution, was declared on 26 June 1975.
Even before the Emergency Proclamation was ratified by Parliament, Gandhi called out the police and the army to break up the strikes and protests, ordering the arrest of all opposition leaders that very night. Many of these were men who had first been jailed by the British in the 1930s and 1940s. The power to impose curfews and unlimited powers of detention were granted to police, while all publications were directly censored by the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting. Elections were indefinitely postponed, and non-Congress state governments were dismissed.
The Prime Minister pushed a series of increasingly harsh bills and constitutional amendments through parliament with little discussion or debate. In particular, there was an attempt to amend the Constitution to not only protect a sitting Prime Minister from prosecution, but even to prevent the prosecution of a Prime Minister once he or she had left the post. It was clear that Gandhi was attempting to protect herself from legal prosecution once emergency rule was revoked.
Gandhi further utilized President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, to issue ordinances that did not need to be debated in Parliament, allowing her - and Sanjay - to effectively rule by decree. Inder Kumar Gujral, a future Prime Minister but then Gandhi's Minister for Information and Broadcasting, resigned to protest Sanjay's interference in his Ministry's work.
The Prime Minister's emergency rule lasted nineteen months. During this time, in spite of the controversy involved, the country made significant economic and industrial progress. This was primarily due to the end it put to strikes in factories, colleges, and universities and the disciplining of trade and student unions. In line with the slogan on billboards everywhere Baatein kam, kaam zyada, ("Less talk, more work"), productivity increased and administration was streamlined. Tax evasion was reduced by zealous government officials, although corruption remained. Agricultural and industrial production expanded considerably under Gandhi's 20-point programme; revenues increased, and so did India's financial standing in the international community. Thus much of the urban middle class in particular found it worth their while to contain their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.
Simultaneously, a draconian campaign to stamp out dissent included the arrest and torture of thousands of political activists; the ruthless clearing of slums around Delhi's Jama Masjid ordered by Sanjay and carried out by Jagmohan, which left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and thousands killed, and led to the permanent ghettoisation of the nation's capital; and the family planning program which forcibly imposed vasectomy on thousands of fathers and was often poorly administered, nurturing a public anger against family planning that persists into the 21st century.
In 1977, greatly misjudging her own popularity, Gandhi called elections and was roundly defeated by the Janata Party. Janata, led by her longtime rival, Desai and with Narayan as its spiritual guide, claimed the elections were the last chance for India to choose between "democracy and dictatorship." To the surprise of some - mainly Western - observers, she meekly agreed to step down.

Desai became Prime Minister and Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the establishment choice of 1979, became President of the Republic. Gandhi had lost her seat and found herself without work, income or residence. The Congress Party split, and veteran Gandhi supporters like Jagjivan Ram abandoned her for Janata. The Congress (Gandhi) Party was now a much smaller group in Parliament, although the official opposition. Unable to govern owing to fractious coalition warfare, the Janata government's Home Minister, Choudhary Charan Singh, ordered the arrest of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi on a slew of charges. Her arrest and long-running trial, however, projected the image of a helpless woman being victimized by the Government, and this triggered her political rebirth.
The Janata coalition was only united by its hatred of Gandhi (or "that woman" as some called her). Although freedom returned, the government was so bogged down by infighting that almost no attention was paid to her basic needs. She was able to use the situation to her advantage. She began giving speeches again, tacitly apologizing for "mistakes" made during the Emergency, and garnering support from icons like Vinoba Bhave. Desai resigned in June 1979, and Singh was appointed Prime Minister by the President.
Singh attempted to form a government with his Janata (Secular) coalition but lacked a majority. Charan Singh bargained with Gandhi for the support of Congress MPs, causing uproar by his unhesitant coddling of his biggest political opponent. After a short interval, she withdrew her initial support and President Reddy dissolved Parliament, calling fresh elections in 1980. Gandhi's Congress Party was returned to power with a landslide majority.
Indira Gandhi was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (for 1983-1984).

Gandhi's later years were bedevilled with problems in Punjab. A local religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was first set up by the local Congress as an alternative to the regional Akali Dal party, but once his activities turned violent he was excoriated as an extremist and a separatist. In September 1981, Bhindranwale was arrested in Amritsar, but was released twenty five days later because of lack of evidence. After his release, he relocated himself from his headquarters at Mehta Chowk to Guru Nanak Niwas within the Golden Temple precincts.
Disturbed by the spread of militancy by Bhindranwale's group, Gandhi gave the Army permission to storm the Golden Temple to flush out Bhindranwale and his followers on June 3, 1984. Many Sikhs were outraged at the perceived desecration of their holiest shrine, which remains controversial in terms of timing and effect to this day.
On October 31, 1984, two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated her in the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at No. 1, Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. As she was walking to be interviewed by the British actor Peter Ustinov filming a documentary for Irish television, she passed a wicket gate, guarded by Satwant and Beant; when she bent down to greet them in traditional Indian style, they opened fire with their semiautomatic machine pistols. She died on her way to hospital, in her official car, but was not declared dead till many hours later.
Indira Gandhi was cremated on November 3, near Raj Ghat and the place was called Shakti Sthal.
Main article: 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms
After her death, anti-Sikh pogroms engulfed New Delhi and spread across the country, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Many leaders of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee, long accused by neutral observers of a hand in the violence, were tried for incitement to murder and arson some years later; but the cases were all dismissed for lack of evidence.

Initially Sanjay had been her chosen heir; but after his death in a flying accident, his mother persuaded a reluctant Rajiv Gandhi to quit his job as a pilot and enter politics in February 1981. He became Prime Minister on her death; in May 1991, he too was assassinated, this time at the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militants. Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, a native Italian, led a novel Congress-led coalition to a surprise electoral victory in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, over Atal Behari Vajpayee and his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from power.
Sonia Gandhi controversially declined the opportunity to assume the office of Prime Minister but remains in control of the Congress political apparatus; Dr. Manmohan Singh, finance minister 1992-97, now heads the nation. Rajiv's children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, have also entered politics. Sanjay Gandhi's widow, Maneka Gandhi, who fell out with Indira after Sanjay's death and was famously thrown out of the Prime Minister's house, as well as Sanjay's son, Varun Gandhi, are active in politics as members of the main opposition BJP party.
Though frequently called The Nehru-Gandhi Family, Indira Gandhi was in no way related to Mohandas Gandhi. Though the Mahatma was a family friend, the Gandhi in her name comes from her marriage to Feroze Gandhi.

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Jawaharlal Nehru (Hindi: जवाहरलाल नेहरू) (14 November 1889 - 27 May 1964), also called Pandit (Scholar or Teacher) Nehru, was one of the most important leaders of the Indian Independence Movement and, as the head of the Indian National Congress, became the first Prime Minister of India when India won its independence on 15 August 1947.
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad on 14 November 1889, to Swarupani, the wife of Motilal Nehru, a wealthy Allahabad-based barrister prominent in the Indian National Congress. He was Motilal Nehru's only son; he had three younger sisters including Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The Nehru family is of Kashmiri lineage and of the Saraswat Brahmin caste.
Educated in the finest schools in India and abroad, Nehru returned from education in England at Harrow, Trinity College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple to practice law before following his father into politics.
By his parents' arrangement, Nehru married Kamala Kaul, then seventeen in 1916. At the time of his wedding on 8 February 1916, Jawaharlal was twenty-six, a British-educated barrister. Kamala came from a well-known business family of Kashmiris in Delhi.

His father Motilal Nehru was already a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress and had served as its president. Thus when a young and glamorous Jawaharlal entered the Congress, much was expected of him.
It soon became clear that the younger Nehru did not share his father's moderate-liberal line. He began to grow closer to the rising leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a former barrister who had won battles for equality and political rights for Indians in South Africa, and had emerged a national hero with the successful struggles in Champaran, Bihar and Kheda in Gujarat. Nehru was instantly attracted to Gandhi's commitment to active, but peaceful, civil disobedience. Gandhi himself saw promise in the young man.
The Nehru family transformed their lifestyle according to Gandhi's teachings. Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru abandoned western clothes and tastes for expensive possessions and pastimes, and adopted Hindustani as their common language of use. Young Jawaharlal now wore a khadi kurta and a Gandhi cap, all in white - the new uniform of the Indian nationalist. Nehru was first arrested by the British during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-1922, but released after a few months.
After Gandhi suspended civil resistance in 1922 as a result of the killing of policemen in Chauri Chaura, thousands of Congressmen were disillusioned. When Gandhi opposed participation in the newly created legislative councils, many followed Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru into the Swaraj Party, which advocated entry but only to sabotage government from within, as a tool to extracting concessions from the British to ensure stability. But Nehru did not join his father and stayed with Gandhi and the Congress.
Jawaharlal was elected President of the Allahabad Municipal Corporation in 1924, and served for two years as the city's chief executive. This would be valuable but the only administrative experience Nehru would have before taking on India's whole government in 1947. He used his tenure to expand public education, health care and sanitation. He resigned citing lack of cooperation from civil servants and obstruction from British authorities.
From 1926 to 1928, Jawaharlal served as the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee, an important step in his rise to Congress national leadership.

Jawaharlal's break with his father cemented his position as the leader of a new generation of Congressmen, with political beliefs that were more radical than those held by their fathers. He, like many others, had been exposed to socialism in England and Europe; following freedom struggles in Ireland and the revolution in Russia, Nehru became one of the first major Indian political figures to embrace the idea of full political independence from the British Empire, an idea first proposed by Bhagat Singh and the revolutionaries. Even Gandhi and Motilal Nehru had not yet committed to this, but Nehru's vision was shared by many among the younger generation, including Subhas Chandra Bose, and a growing number of Indians not in public life.

Upon his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi succeeded in re-uniting the Congress Party. He chose to increase the internal discipline of the party by expanding its activities that promoted social reform and the alleviation of India's poor.
In 1928-29, the Congress's annual session under the presidency of Motilal Nehru considered the next step. Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose backed a call for full political independence or swaraj, while Motilal Nehru and others wanted dominion status within the British Empire. To resolve the point, Gandhi said that the British would be given two years to grant India dominion status. If they did not, the Congress would launch a national struggle for full, political independence. Nehru and Bose reduced the time of opportunity to one year. The Government in Whitehall did not respond.
When the Congress convened its session in 1929, Gandhi backed the young Jawaharlal for the Congress presidency. Although confessing embarrassment at his hurried ascent, President Nehru declared India's independence on January 26, 1930 in Lahore, raised free India's flag in a large public convention on the banks of the Ravi and inaugurated the struggle. Nehru was arrested in 1930, and during the Salt Satyagraha of 1931; he was interned for a number of years.
The movement was an astounding national success. Millions of Indians had participated, and the government was ultimately forced to acknowledge that there was a need for major political reform, which the British Parliament attempted in the form of the Government of India Act 1935. The Act set up a bicameral structure of authority, with provision for popular elections. The Congress Party decided to contest elections, but Nehru personally did not stand. He, however, campaigned vigorously nationwide for the party, further raising his profile with the Indian public. The Congress formed governments in 7 of the 11 provinces, and won the largest number of seats in the Central Assembly, which the Congress had denounced as powerless. But it was able to exercise control of provincial affairs, giving India its first taste of democratic self-government.

Nehru was elected again to the Congress Presidency in 1936 and 1937. In his famous speech to the session in Lucknow in 1936, he pushed the passage of the Avadi Resolution which committed the Congress to socialism as the basis of the future agenda of a free India's government. In this matter he successfully overcame the opposition of major Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Sardar Patel, who opposed it for different reasons. To gain support, Nehru transformed his position to commit that the resolution did not in fact bind Congress to socialism, and that the Congress Party's main goal was independence, not socialism. However, Nehru had grown politically closer to Congress socialists like Jaya Prakash Narayan, Narendra Dev and the liberal-socialist Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Nehru's victory over the right wing of Congress in 1936 and the chaos of the Tripura session of 1939, following which his only serious rival on the left of Congress, Subhash Chandra Bose, left the party to form the Forward Bloc, ensured his pre-eminence among the nationalist leaders of his generation.
When World War II broke out, Nehru and the Congress condemned the Government of India's decision to enter the war; they were angered that the decision had been taken by the Viceregal Council without consulting the nationalist leadership, but were divided as to what to do about it. Nehru and Patel made an offer of cooperation with the British, promising whole-hearted support if after the war, the British would deliver India's political freedom. This was opposed by Gandhi, but marked the first occasion when a majority of Congress leaders went against his advice. Several British politicians and British officials backed the offer, considering Indian support valuable, but the bid failed when a new government under a hostile Winston Churchill ruled out any political reform.
The Congress Party ordered all of its elected members in the Central and provincial assemblies to resign, and another national struggle seemed inevitable. Nehru and Maulana Azad were lukewarm to Gandhi's call for revolt, still considering it a good possibility that the British would ultimately concede independence for Indian support, and concerned about the timing of the initiative. Although many other Indian political parties opposed the call, Gandhi and Sardar Patel convinced Nehru and Azad, and the entire Indian National Congress towards what they believed would be a final confrontation with a weakened British Empire.
The Quit India Movement was launched on August 13, 1942. The Congress made an open call for complete independence immediately. Only an independent India, they said, should decide whether India would participate in the war. The Congress asked all Indians to boycott British goods, the institutions and factories run by the British, public services and government programs. Major strikes, protests and demonstrations broke out all over India, and although other political parties did not participate, it proved to be the most forceful revolt in the history of British rule. This was in spite of the fact that Gandhi and the entire Congress Working Committee were arrested practically immediately. The Committee was imprisoned in a fort-turned-prison in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, separate from Gandhi, who was imprisoned in Pune. The British had made arrangements to deport the leaders if necessary, but felt that then any chance of regaining order would be lost due to public outrage. Outside, hundreds of thousands of Indian freedom fighters were imprisoned, and thousands were killed in police firing.
Incarcerated for 32 months with his fellow Congress leaders, Nehru focused on writing the Discovery of India, a tour through Indian history and culture.

Upon the end of the war, Nehru and the Congress leadership were released. In the landmark 1945 General Elections in Britain Winston Churchill, a long-time opponent of Indian independence, was defeated by the Labour Party of Clement Attlee; the new government began preparing plans for India's independence.
In 1946, the Congress convened its session for a presidential election, knowing fully that this leader would become the head of India's government.
Nehru, unlike Patel, was nominated by no state unit, but the Working Committee made a tentative nomination. It is believed that Gandhi asked Patel to withdraw himself from the election, allowing Nehru's election, and that Patel promptly did so. This relatively undocumented episode is deeply controversial to contemporary historians.

Elections were held in 1946 to the Constituent Assembly of India. The Congress swept the vote at the central level and most of British India's provinces.
The All India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah had become the prime political opponent of the Congress. The League demanded a separate Muslim state, and enjoyed the support of many of India's Muslims.
Nehru and the Congress Party strongly opposed India's partition, or any excessive political concessions to the League to prevent this. The party accepted the May 16 Plan proposed by the Cabinet Mission led by Sir Stafford Cripps as the only resort to preventing India's division as proposed in the June 16 plan. Although the May 16 plan envisioned communal grouping of India's provinces, the Congress accepted to keep the League from usurping control of the new interim government. When the League pulled out from the process, Congress was left in complete control of the new government. Nehru became the Vice President of the Viceroy's Executive Council, de facto head of government.
But Jinnah's Direct Action Day to protest this left over 10,000 Hindus and Muslims dead in the following months. Fearing communal chaos, the Congress decided to allow the League to enter the council. However, Nehru's leadership was rejected by the new League ministers, and the council stalled over every policy decision.
Considering a political coalition unworkable and the communal situation dangerous enough to lead to full civil war between Hindus and Muslims, Nehru and Sardar Patel backed the plan of Lord Louis Mountbatten, India's last viceroy to partition the country into India and Pakistan. Nehru and Patel managed to convince Gandhi, who was fearful about partition but even more fearful of civil war. The AICC adopted the resolution in June, 1947. Nehru served on the Partition Council that finalized the separation of government institutions and provincial resources between the two new dominions.
On August 15th, 1947, India became an independent nation. At the age of 58, Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of India. Lord Louis Mountbatten became the Governor General of the Dominion, and the Constituent Assembly began work to draft the Constitution of India and transition to a sovereign Republic.

Jawaharlal Nehru served as India's Prime Minister from August 15, 1947, to May 27, 1964 - the day he died.
1947 to 1952
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru headed a Cabinet that included leaders from across the political spectrum like Syama Prasad Mookerjee and B.R. Ambedkar. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was the Deputy Prime Minister of India and the Union Home Minister. Although Patel was powerful in the Congress Party and enjoyed far more of the respect and support of party bureaucrats than Nehru did, he could not match Nehru's popularity with the masses, his youth and dynamism. But India's first administration was a duumvirate, and Nehru did not dominate. Whenever the two faced a dispute, they would ask Gandhi to arbitrate and decide the matter.
Nehru and Patel spent their first weeks in strenuous efforts to restore peace to Punjab and Bengal after partition, and rehabilitating over 10 million incoming refugees from Pakistan. When Pakistani raiders attacked the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, Nehru insisted upon the state's immediate accession before the aiding of military assistance. While the state complied, in December 1947 Nehru declared a unilateral cease-fire and asked the UN to arbitrate the Kashmir dispute. This move is believed by some in India today to be partially responsible for the persistence of the Kashmir problem.
Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 was a major blow to India. Nehru wept as did many millions of Indians, and he and Patel embraced together. Many called for Patel's resignation following the murder, blaming his Home Ministry for failing to protect Gandhi, but Nehru rejected Patel's resignation, and gave an unusual and personal vote of confidence, and a commitment to work together[citation needed]. Patel was also bound by a promise to Gandhi to stay in government, but was prepared to resign if Nehru did not desire for his continuance.
However, Nehru and Patel still disagreed on the issue of Hyderabad, which had resisted annexation. Nehru and Mountbatten engaged in strenuous diplomacy in the months when Patel was recuperating from a heart attack, but with their failure Nehru was forced to concede the need for military action. Patel undertook Operation Polo as Acting Prime Minister while Nehru was in Europe, and Hyderabad was merged into the Union. But Nehru resisted similar action on Goa, occupied by the Portuguese and resisted sending military aid to Tibet, which was invaded by Communist China in 1950.
More than 900,000 Hindu refugees had flooded out of East Pakistan, fearing intimidation and violence from Muslims. There were many allegations of government-forced evictions, and since over 1 million people had died since partition, it was a political firestorm. Nehru invited Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to Delhi to discuss the matter, against the advice of Sardar Patel and many other Indian politicians. Although aware of military options, Nehru wanted to make his best effort for peace.
The Delhi Pact of 1949 guaranteed minority rights in both countries, creating minority commissions in the Punjab and Bengal provinces of both countries. It was strongly condemned as appeasement in West Bengal by Hindus, and several Cabinet ministers resigned in protest. Nehru became a hated figure overnight. Although Patel had firmly criticized it, he now publicly defended it. Visiting West Bengal, he talked to the common people and a variety of Hindu and Muslim citizen groups, asking the people to give peace a last try. As a result of Patel's efforts, the pact was approved and around 800,000 Hindus returned to East Pakistan.
Nehru was embarrassed when he tried to impose his preference on the Congress presidential election of 1950, lobbying against conservative Purushottam Das Tandon and again trying to approve Governor General Chakravarti Rajgopalachari as the first President of the forthcoming Indian Republic. Going against the will of the majority of Congressmen and rejecting Patel's aid, Nehru was strongly criticized within the party. Tandon won his election, and the party backed its favorite Dr. Rajendra Prasad, who became the first President of India.
At this point, Nehru considered resignation, believing his support in the party fragile. Patel rebuked him for ignoring the party membership but assured him there was no need to resign. With Patel's support, Nehru continued in office.
The Constitution of India was signed on January 26, 1949, and came into effect the next year. In 1952, India held its first democratic national elections, and Nehru led the Congress Party to a sweeping majority in the Parliament of India.
Sardar Patel had died at the end of 1950, and the real Nehru era was about to begin.

In 1946, Nehru had moved into the former residence of the British Commander in Chief of the Indian Army on York Road, in Delhi. With independence, this became known as Teen Murti House, the official residence of the PM, and after Nehru's death in 1964, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
Nehru lived alone initially, but was later joined by his daughter Indira Gandhi, who despite having a young family of her own felt a need to take care of her father's personal needs. Over the years she became his virtual chief of staff - managing his schedule and appointments, instructing the staff of the residence and often accompanying him on foreign trips and in meetings with world leaders.
The iconic image of Nehru with a rose in the breast pocket of his achkan arose from a daily act of remembrance; his wife gave him a rose on her death-bed and, after her passing, he began picking a fresh rose every morning in her memory.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's administration created the doctrines that formed the backbone of India's social and economic development, national defense and foreign policy for decades. Though they remain controversial to this day, the foundations of Indian Defence and Space Programmes along with educational institutions like IIT and IIM and innumerable dams that helped in Green Revolution are directly attributed to Nehru.

Nehru was fascinated by the Soviet Union's Piatiletka or 5-year plans. But he wrote after a visit there in the 1920s that 'the human costs are unpayable'. A believer in the 'mixed economy' of Harold Laski and influenced by the Fabian Society, Nehru wished the economy of India to be partially capitalist, but with the state occupying a large role, especially in the commanding heights of the economy.
In setting a path for the economic policy after Independence, he chose from a set of options considerably more limited than those available today, and followed to a large degree the conventional wisdom at the time among academic economists, both in India and the West. India's growth rate in GDP stayed moderately above 4% during all the years that Nehru was Prime Minister. It is hard to say definitively how much growth there might have been with different economic policies: predominantly capitalist Western Europe grew slightly faster than India during the Nehru years (especially during the decade after World War II); but so did the command economies of communist China and the Soviet Union. The strongly capitalist USA grew somewhat more slowly, as did most of the newly independent nations that followed WWII (with the exception of oil-producing nations).
Some recent (but isolated) studies influenced by Chicago School economists-such as one by Goldman Sachs-have claimed that India had the potential to grow faster than it did in the post-Nehru 1960-1980 timeframe. According to this thinking, that opportunity was wasted out of a misplaced faith in the power of economic planning. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who spoke consistently for three decades in favour of market reform, has remarked that India's problem has been that it has too many brilliant economists; Bhagwati believes the stalwarts of Nehru's Planning Commissions began to believe in their own infallibility, to the detriment of the Indian nation. Other opponents at the time included the Bombay Club, a group of industrialists headed by J.R.D. Tata who had an alternative development approach mapped out, and the former Governor-General and prominent anti-socialist C. Rajagopalachari, who left the Congress for the Swatantra Party over the issue.
In hindsight, the Nehruvian model failed in many of its objectives; however, many Indian economists-particularly among Nehru's contemporaries-believe Nehru's emphasis on central planning was the right policy for India of that time.
Some critics of Indian economic development believe that Indian economy prior to reform in 1991, with inefficient public sector entities on the one hand, and crony-capitalist private sector entities that used the so-called license raj to carve out lucrative niches for themselves on the other, was a product of economic policy foundations laid during Nehru's tenure.
Nehru's economic policies are sometimes confused by critics with those of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, which were more statist and dirigiste in orientation. Nehru's economics of state intervention and investment were conceived at a time when transfers of capital and technology important to India were not easily forthcoming from the developed world (which at the time also had plenty of state-sponsored capital controls.)

Nehru's foreign policy was strongly idealist as opposed to the realism favoured by his opponents. Central to this idealism was Nehru's doctrine of Panchshila, (the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence). The basis of the 1954 Sino-Indian treaty over Tibet, it was taken by the Chinese as a statement of Indian pacifism. As conceived by Nehru, Panchshila was based upon mutual respect among nations, peaceful coexistence, and non-interference in the internal affairs of others. He had offered it to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung Conference in 1955 as the guiding philosophy for an emerging Third World power bloc, an alternative to Moscow and Washington.
He was strongly supportive of anti-colonialism, and the freedom movements in Tanzania, Algeria, Indochina and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. Nehru was also one of the founding statesmen of the Non Aligned Movement, of Asian and African nations seeking to stay away from the pressures of the alliances created by the USA and USSR. Nehru also condemned the invasion of Suez in 1956 by Israel, the United Kingdom and France.
Nehru's leadership of the newly independent nations of the Third World was taken as assumed throughout the 1950s, and thus India's stature in foreign affairs was assured, until at least the Chinese war of 1962.
The Soviet Union was the only major power during Nehru's tenure to aid India in developing independent capabilities areas of heavy industry, engineering, and technology. This political fact, combined with Nehru's preference for state-led development, promoted suspicion about the sincerity of India's non-aligned foreign policy positions. However, Nehru's neutrality was strongly criticized when he failed to condemn the USSR's invasion of Hungary in 1956-58.
On November 27, 1946, Nehru appealed to the United States and the Soviet Union to end nuclear testing and to start nuclear disarmament, stating that such an action would "save humanity".

The Panchshila was the basis of the 1954 Sino-Indian treaty over Tibet; unfortunately, it was taken by the Chinese as a statement of Indian pacifism. The conference at Bandung at which the Panchshila was declared was also where Nehru introduced the newly independent Chinese leaders to the world. He assumed that as former colonies they shared a sense of solidarity, as expressed in the phrase Hindi-Chini bhai bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers). But much to China's chagrin, Nehru and India, as heir apparent to the British Empire in Asia, assumed the mantle of leadership of the movement. Mao was infuriated. He believed that his sense of cultural superiority and unquestioned revolutionary credentials dictated China to be the rightful leader. This made the subsequent border issue more than territorial; it was an opportunity for China to assert it's pre-eminence as an Asian power and to humiliate India. Unfortunately, Nehru never understood this aspect of the equation. He was dedicated to the ideals of brotherhood and solidarity among Third World nations, while China was dedicated to a vision of itself as the hegemon of Asia.
Nehru did not believe that one fellow Socialist country would attack another; and in any event, he felt secure behind the impregnable wall of ice that is the Himalayas. Both proved to be tragic miscalculations of China's determination and military capabilities. Nehru tried to engage China in a prolonged strategy of diplomacy, while on the ground Indian troops moved to outflank Chinese positions. Eventually, China took direct action in 1962, starting the Sino-Indian War.
China was encouraged by its perception of India as a "weak" target. After all, Nehru had taken no action in 1951 when China invaded and occupied Tibet, eliminating the traditional buffer between the two; and, except to grant asylum to the Dalai Lama, he, again, did nothing in 1959, when China ruthlessly put down the uprising in Tibet.
Forty years later, few know the real story of what happened, what went wrong. Why India was not able to defeat the Chinese People's Liberation Army in a bitter and cold battle in the Northeast. India has repaired its relationship with the Chinese to some extent, but those wounds have not been forgotten. The military debacle against China in 1962 was thoroughly investigated in the Henderson-Brooks Report which successive Indian governments have refused to release.
It was a revelation (if not shock) to most when in an interview on the BBC, George Fernandes (former Indian Defence Minister), said that the Coco island was part of India until it was donated to Burma (Myanmar) by Nehru. The Coco island is located at 18 km from the Indian Nicobar island. At present, China has an intelligence gathering station on the Coco Island to monitor Indian naval activity as well as ISRO & DRDO missile and space launch activities.

His daughter Indira Gandhi would become Prime Minister within two years of his death in 1966, and would serve for 15 years and 3 terms. His grandson Rajiv Gandhi would hold that office from 1984 to 1989. Today, Rajiv's widow Sonia Gandhi, is the Congress Party's president, though not Prime Minister. Her son Rahul Gandhi entered Parliament in the 2004 General Elections.

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