A short life of the author
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was the Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, making her the second-longest-serving Indian prime minister and the country’s only woman to hold the office. The daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru — India’s first prime minister — and the mother of Rajiv Gandhi — who succeeded her — she was the central figure in three decades of Indian political life. Her legacy is deeply contested: she modernised Indian agriculture through the Green Revolution, led India to decisive military victory in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and expanded India’s nuclear capabilities, but she also imposed the Emergency (1975–1977), suspended civil liberties, imprisoned political opponents, and centralised power in ways that damaged Indian democratic institutions. Her writings, though not literary in the conventional sense, are significant historical documents.
Life and Political Career
Born in Allahabad into the Nehru family — one of the most prominent political dynasties in Indian history — Gandhi grew up in an atmosphere of nationalist politics, imprisonment, and sacrifice. Her grandfather Motilal Nehru and her father Jawaharlal Nehru were both leaders of the Indian independence movement and spent years in British prisons. She was educated at Visva-Bharati University (founded by Rabindranath Tagore) and at Somerville College, Oxford, though she did not complete her degree.
She married Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) in 1942, a union opposed by her father. She entered politics gradually, serving as Congress Party president in 1959 before becoming prime minister in 1966 after the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Initially underestimated by party bosses who expected her to be a pliable figurehead, she proved to be a formidable and ruthless political operator. She split the Congress party, nationalised India’s banks, abolished the privy purses of former princely states, and won a massive electoral mandate in 1971 with the slogan Garibi Hatao (“Abolish Poverty”).
The 1971 war with Pakistan — which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh — was her greatest military and diplomatic triumph. India’s decisive intervention, conducted over thirteen days, was supported by a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union that balanced Nixon and Kissinger’s tilt toward Pakistan. She was hailed as Durga — the Hindu goddess of war — and her domestic popularity reached its zenith.
The Emergency of 1975–1977 was her greatest political crime. Faced with a court ruling that invalidated her 1971 election on grounds of electoral malpractice, she declared a state of emergency, suspended fundamental rights, censored the press, imprisoned thousands of political opponents, and allowed her son Sanjay Gandhi to conduct a coercive sterilisation campaign. When she lifted the Emergency and called elections in 1977, she was voted out of office — the Indian electorate’s clearest demonstration that democracy in India was not just a procedural formality.
She returned to power in 1980 and confronted a Sikh separatist insurgency in Punjab. Her decision to order Operation Blue Star — the Indian Army’s assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984 — was the proximate cause of her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984. The anti-Sikh riots that followed her death killed thousands.
Writings
Gandhi was not a literary writer, but her collected speeches, correspondence, and autobiographical reflections constitute important primary sources for twentieth-century Indian and world history.
My Truth (1981) — a collection of autobiographical essays and reflections — offers Gandhi’s own account of her political philosophy, her relationship with her father, her views on India’s place in the world, and her justification of controversial decisions including the Emergency. The book is self-serving in places but also revealing in its frankness about the isolation of power.
Her correspondence with Nehru, published in various volumes, provides extraordinary insight into the formation of a political mind. Nehru’s Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1929) and Glimpses of World History (1934) — written to Indira from prison — are among the most remarkable documents of twentieth-century political education. (Note: Glimpses of World History is Nehru’s work, though sometimes catalogued under Indira’s name in bookshop databases.)
Her collected speeches, published in multiple volumes by the Government of India, cover topics from nuclear policy to women’s education to Cold War non-alignment.
Critical Assessment
Gandhi’s place in history is fiercely debated. To her admirers, she was the leader who held India together during its most vulnerable decades, modernised its economy, and asserted its sovereignty against Western and Chinese pressure. To her critics, she was an authoritarian who damaged Indian democracy, centralised power around her family, and pursued policies — the Emergency, Operation Blue Star — that caused immense suffering. Both assessments are true.
Collecting Gandhi
First editions of My Truth (1981, various Indian publishers) bring $20–$50. Signed copies are scarce and valuable — Gandhi signed books infrequently, and authenticated signatures command $200–$500. Government-published volumes of speeches are readily available and inexpensive. Items signed or inscribed by both Nehru and Gandhi are museum-level rarities.