INDIA'S FIRST AND ONLY FEMALE PRIME MINISTER
INDIRA GANDHI
Gandhi inherited a India still finding its footing after Partition and her father Jawaharlal Nehru's death. She centralized power within the Congress party and the state itself, nationalized India's major banks in 1969 and abolished the privy purses paid to former princely rulers. Moves that reshaped the economy toward state control and cemented her populist base among the poor and rural voters, "Garibi Hatao" meaning "Eradicate Poverty" became her defining slogan.
Her most consequential foreign policy act came in 1971. India's decisive military intervention in the Bangladesh Liberation War led to Pakistan's split and the creation of Bangladesh. It was one of the most significant reshufflings of South Asian borders since Partition and established India as the region's dominant military power, cementing a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union along the way.
In 1974, India conducted "Smiling Buddha," its first nuclear test, under Gandhi's government, announced as a "peaceful nuclear explosion." It made India the first country outside the UN Security Council's permanent five to demonstrate nuclear capability, reshaping South Asian and global nonproliferation politics for decades.
Her government presided over the full rollout of the Green Revolution, high-yield wheat and rice varieties, expanded irrigation and fertilizer use, which took India from a nation reliant on food aid to one approaching grain self-sufficiency by the mid-1970s.
In 1984, after ordering a military assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar (Operation Blue Star) to remove armed Sikh separatists occupying the site, Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. Her death triggered anti-Sikh pogroms across India in which thousands were killed, a wound in Indian communal politics still felt today.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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