Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gandhi had spent most of his boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit...
That sort of heritage, a bridge to India's early dreams as a nation and even earlier struggle for freedom, will not be replaced easily. The Indian National Congress, with Nehru's father Motilal at its head before him, had been the sturdy vehicle that liberated India from white sahibs, created a promising republic and shaped a sense of common purpose among a kaleidoscopic variety of / religions, complexions, castes and tongues. But if the party had once relied on secularism and consensus building, in more recent years it became the fief of one family. Devoted to her country...
What may be the end of the line for the Nehrus and Gandhis may also rid India of the cult of personality and the stranglehold of centralized power. When Indira was elevated to the Congress presidency in 1959, Nehru was the first to abhor the prospect of a dynasty. He later told an American interviewer, "I am not capable of ruling from the grave. How terrible it would be if I, after all I have said about the processes of democratic government, were to attempt to handpick a successor. The best I can do for India is to help...
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was reminiscing about her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, some years ago. "People say he was like the banyan tree: nothing and nobody grew in his shadow," she mused. "They are wrong. He was like the sun, and let everything and everybody grow -- even the weeds, let us be honest." It was vintage Indira, who would have denied there was a Nehru dynasty even as she came to symbolize...
...widow of Rajiv's younger brother Sanjay, is highly ambitious and politically astute, currently holding office as Minister of Environment. But she quarreled with the family when Indira cut her out of the succession after Sanjay's death, and joined the opposition. The only other possible choice is Arun Nehru, 47, a cousin of Rajiv's and a former corporate executive who once was Minister of Internal Security in Rajiv's Cabinet. But the two fell out in 1986, and Arun does not seem to have either the political support or popular appeal needed to make a successful...