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| Sunday, 31 October 2004 |
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Indira Gandhi remembered with strong emotions NEW DELHI, Saturday (AFP) Twenty years after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India is remembering with strong emotions the woman who holds the record as the longest serving prime minister of the world's largest democracy. When India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964, his daughter Indira was not seriously considered as a successor. However just two years later, when prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died suddenly, she was chosen to fill the void. Dismissed infamously by the opposition as a "dumb doll", Indira Gandhi eventually wielded staggering power, ruling India from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984. "She went through various phases from healthy left-leaning populism in the late-1960s culminating in her 'garbi hatoa' (remove poverty) drive, then she went through a terrible phase of paranoia in imposing a state of emergency on the country," said political analyst and writer Praful Bidwai. Fiercely socialist, Gandhi abolished privy purses - personal allowance payments to India's erstwhile maharajas - which she felt were anachronistic. But after re-election in 1971, she stunned the world by declaring a state of emergency in the mid-1970s and in her own words brought democracy "to a grinding halt." Her opponents were jailed, the press muzzled. |
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