Word: gandhis
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...Only after ten days of Shastri's pleading did she agree to serve as Minister of Information and Broadcasting, a minor post. After less than two years in office, Shastri suddenly died, and the Congress Party bosses could not agree on a successor. They turned to Mrs. Gandhi as someone who could serve while the struggle for power went...
...nearly 50, and with very little official experience, Indira Gandhi almost accidentally became the leader of India's millions. She seemed to have no clear idea of what to do. The economy lurched into a major recession, bad weather brought threats of famine, and a general election the following year sharply reduced the Congress Party's majority. "The Prime Minister has no program, no world view, no grand design," one of her aides later commented. Mrs. Gandhi corroborated that analysis, in a way, when she said, "I have a housewife's mentality when I go about...
...astonishment of her original supporters, Mrs. Gandhi turned out to be a fighter. In 1967 she proposed a controversial ten-point program that included nationalizing the commercial banks and cutting off the government's $6 million annual subsidies to a variety of maharajahs and princelings. When conservative opponents rallied around her chief rival, Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai, she dismissed him from her Cabinet. When the party chiefs, angered by her leftward turn, expelled her for "grave acts of undiscipline," she went to the Parliament and won a vote of confidence. When she called a surprise election...
...Gandhi was at the peak of her power, but she was still unable to deal with the huge problems of governing India. The costs of the 1971 war, which had brought millions of refugees pouring into India, helped send the economy into another spin. The badly divided Congress Party was widely accused of graft and incompetence. Mrs. Gandhi's main interest was in claiming the role of a great power. She detonated India's first atom bomb in 1974 and reached out for Soviet aid and weaponry to re-equip India's armed forces...
Dorothy Norman, a New York-based writer and photographer, first met Indira Gandhi, then 31, when she accompanied her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to the U.S. in 1949. The two women instantly struck up a friendship that they were to sustain over 35 years in India, the U.S. and while traveling together through Europe. In her book of memoirs, Encounters, to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Norman recalls her impressions of the Prime Minister's lonely and often sickly daughter and includes several affectionate, heartfelt letters that Indira wrote her during the '50s. Excerpts from those...