Indira Gandhi

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, who lived from 1917 to 1984, was India's first and to date only female prime minister, serving two non-consecutive terms, from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her death in 1984. The daughter of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and mother of her eventual successor, Rajiv Gandhi, she occupied a central position in Indian politics for more than three decades, and her cumulative time in office across four terms makes her the second longest serving Indian prime minister after her father. Her tenure included a brief 1967 border conflict with China and the decisive 1971 war with Pakistan, which resulted in the independence of Bangladesh, as well as India's first successful nuclear weapons test in 1974 and closer ties with the Soviet Union. From 1975 to 1977 she declared a state of emergency during which she ruled by decree, suspended basic civil liberties, and oversaw the imprisonment of more than a hundred thousand political opponents, journalists and other dissenters, a period that remains the most controversial of her rule. On October 31, 1984, she was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in apparent retaliation for Operation Blue Star, a military action she had ordered against militants inside the Golden Temple in Amritsar that killed hundreds of people, and her legacy remains sharply divided between praise for decisive leadership and criticism of authoritarian governance.