Indira Gandhi was the only woman Prime Minister of India. She was the only child of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and was named Priyadarshini. It was later when she entered politics that she began to be called Indira. Born in 1917 in Allahabad, Indira went on to study at Vishwa Bharati University at Kolkata after matriculation. For further studies, she went to Oxford in Britain and later to Somerville College.

Upon coming back to India, she joined her father’s political party – Congress and became the Prime Minister in 1966. She served two terms on that post. The first one ended in 1977 and the second lasted from 1980 till her assassination in 1984.

Indira was married to Feroze Gandhi and had two sons – Sanjay and Rajiv. She initiated and headed many revolutionary moves of the government. One was the nationalization of all banks. Another was Operation Bluestar where she gave orders for the army to terminate the terrorists hiding in the Golden Temple at Amritsar. This brought her a lot of ire from the Sikh community and also became the cause of her assassination by a Sikh.

Many journalists often say that the terrorist movement in Punjab was fuelled by Indira herself before she ordered for its brutal end. But one wonders what the real truth is!