Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...changed. That evening, less than twelve hours after Indira's death, the elders of the Congress (I) Party chose Rajiv Gandhi as their new leader. As under the British parliamentary system, he thereby automatically became India's seventh Prime Minister. He is the third member of the House of Nehru, which has run India for 33 of its 37 years of independence, to hold that office...
...accounts, Rajiv was one member of the house of Nehru who never lusted for political power. Born in 1944, he was Indira's first son. After attending the well-known Doon School in the hills to the north of New Delhi, Rajiv studied mechanical engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge. Back in India, he became a commercial pilot and joined Indian Airlines, where he flew Boeing 737s and other aircraft for 14 years...
...mother had declared in order to control civil unrest and to strengthen her own political position, but was blamed for some of the emergency's worst excesses. Nevertheless, from about 1975 Indira was clearly grooming Sanjay as her successor. Neither mother nor son ever said explicitly that only a Nehru was capable of ruling India, but both obviously believed, with their Brahman sense of entitlement, that a Nehru could simply do it better...
...also uneasy about talk of his role in a Nehru dynasty. "I don't see it like that at all," he once said. "There's a very big challenge before us today: how to get India into the 20th century." He speaks of the need to eliminate the vestiges of colonialism and the country's age-old social inequities. "We must get the poor and the weak of India out of their rut, out of the morass they are stuck in," he said recently. Most political experts see him as a pragmatist, like his late brother, who favors a somewhat...
What's in a name? Magic, it seems, if the name is Gandhi or Nehru, and the place is India. An unofficial royal family that President Reagan aptly compared to the Adams family in the U.S. and that Indians liken to the Mogul emperors and maharajahs of ages past, the House of Nehru has reigned over independent India in one almost unbroken dynastic line, passing the scepter down from one generation to the next. By now the system of one-family rule has become so firmly entrenched that the newsmagazine India Today calls India "a democratic monarchy...