[15] Indira was her parents' only surviving child (she had a younger brother who died while young);[16] she grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large family estate in Allahabad.

At the beginning of her first term as prime minister, she was widely criticised by the media and the opposition as a "Goongi goodiya" (Hindi for a "dumb doll") of the Congress party bosses who had orchestrated her election and then tried to constrain her.

[44][45] Indira was a reluctant successor to her famed father, although she had accompanied him on several official foreign visits and played an anchor role in bringing down the first democratically elected communist government in Kerala.

[46] According to certain sources it was the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia that first derided her personality as the "Goongi Goodiya" (Hindi for "dumb doll") that later was echoed by other Congress politicians who were wary of her rise in the party.

The Congress Party won a reduced majority in the Lok Sabha after these elections owing to widespread disenchantment over the rising prices of commodities, unemployment, economic stagnation and a food crisis.

[54] The policies of the Congress under Gandhi, before the 1971 elections, also included proposals for the abolition of the Privy Purse to former rulers of the princely states and the 1969 nationalization of the fourteen largest banks in India.

[57][58] In December 1967, Indira Gandhi remarked these developments that "China continues to maintain an attitude of hostility towards us and spares no opportunity to malign us and to carry on anti-Indian propaganda not only against the Indian Government but the whole way of our democratic functioning.

On 3 December 1971, the Pakistan Air Force launched Operation Chengiz Khan, which saw Pakistani aircraft attacking Indian airbases and military installations across the Western border in a pre-emptive strike.

India then conducted another airdrop on 9 December, with Indian forces led by Major General Sagat Singh capturing just under 5,000 Pakistani POWs and also crossing the Meghna River towards Dhaka.

[78] At the time of emergency, there was a widespread rumour that Gandhi had ordered her search guards to eliminate firebrand trade unionist and socialist party leader George Fernandes, while he was on a run.

She won a by-election in the Chikmagalur Constituency and took a seat in the Lok Sabha in November 1978[92][93] after the Janata Party's attempts to have Kannada matinee idol Rajkumar run against her failed when he refused to contest the election saying he wanted to remain apolitical.

[102] Before the 1980 elections Indira Gandhi approached the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid at the time, Syed Abdullah Bukhari and entered into an agreement with him on the basis of 10-point programme to secure the support of the Muslim votes.

In an effort to split the Akali Dal and gain popular support among the Sikhs, Gandhi's Congress Party helped to bring the orthodox religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to prominence in Punjab politics.

[112][113] Later, Bhindranwale's organisation, Damdami Taksal, became embroiled in violence with another religious sect called the Sant Nirankari Mission and he was accused of instigating the murder of Jagat Narain, the owner of the Punjab Kesari newspaper.

Rajiv succeeded his mother as prime minister within hours of her murder and anti-Sikh riots erupted, lasting for several days and killing more than 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi and an estimated 8,000 across India.

Gandhi's authorisation of the detonation of a nuclear device at Pokhran in 1974 was viewed by Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as an attempt to intimidate Pakistan into accepting India's hegemony in the subcontinent.

Nevertheless, Gandhi's close relations with reunified Vietnam and her decision to recognize the Vietnam-installed Government of Cambodia in 1980 meant that India and ASEAN were unable to develop a viable partnership.

[173] Furthermore, the conclusion of the Indo-Soviet treaty in 1971, and threatening gestures by the United States, to send its nuclear-armed Task Force 74 into the Bay of Bengal at the height of the East Pakistan crisis had enabled India to regain its anti-imperialist image.

[184] In November 1982, Yuri Andropov, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union, approved a proposal to fabricate Pakistani intelligence documents detailing ISI plans to foment religious disturbances in Punjab and promote the creation of Khalistan as an independent Sikh state.

[188] In India, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, L. K. Advani, requested of the Government a white paper on the role of foreign intelligence agencies and a judicial enquiry on the allegations.

[54] Sunanda K. Datta-Ray described her as "a master of rhetoric ... often more posture than policy", while The Times journalist, Peter Hazelhurst, famously quipped that Gandhi's socialism was "slightly left of self-interest.

Pankaj Vohra noted that "even the late prime minister's critics would concede that the maximum number of legislations of social significance was brought about during her tenure... [and that] she lives in the hearts of millions of Indians who shared her concern for the poor and weaker sections and who supported her politics.

In one of the early interviews she gave as prime minister, Gandhi ruminated, "I suppose you could call me a socialist, but you have understand what we mean by that term ... we used the word [socialism] because it came closest to what we wanted to do here–which is to eradicate poverty.

[201][209] Much of that growth however, was offset by the fact that the external aid promised by the United States government and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), meant to ease the short-run costs of adjustment to a liberalised economy, never materialised.

While it was thought at the time, and for decades after, that President Johnson's policy of withholding food grain shipments was to coerce Indian support for the war, in fact, it was to offer India rainmaking technology that he wanted to use as a counterweight to China's possession of the atomic bomb.

[198] The measures of the emergency regime was able to halt the economic trouble of the early to mid-1970s, which had been marred by harvest failures, fiscal contraction, and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchanged rates.

[201] There was an emphasis on tightening public expenditures, greater efficiency of the state-owned enterprises (SOE), which Gandhi qualified as a "sad thing", and on stimulating the private sector through deregulation and liberation of the capital market.

[232] However, a contentious issue that was considered unresolved by the Akalis was the status of Chandigarh, a prosperous city on the Punjab-Haryana border, which Gandhi declared a union territory to be shared as a capital by both the states.

While portrayals of Indira Gandhi by actors in Indian cinema have generally been avoided, with filmmakers using back-shots, silhouettes and voiceovers to give impressions of her character, several films surrounding her tenure, policies or assassination have been made.

Notable portrayals include: Sarita Choudhury in Midnight's Children (2012); Mandeep Kohli in Jai Jawaan Jai Kisaan (2015); Supriya Vinod in Indu Sarkar (2017), NTR: Kathanayakudu/NTR: Mahanayakudu (2019) and Yashwantrao Chavan – Bakhar Eka Vaadalaachi (2014); Flora Jacob in Raid (2018), Thalaivi (2021) and Radhe Shyam (2022), Kishori Shahane in PM Narendra Modi (2019), Avantika Akerkar in Thackeray (2019) and 83 (2021), Supriya Karnik in Main Mulayam Singh Yadav (2021), Lara Dutta in Bell Bottom (2021), Fatima Sana Shaikh in Sam Bahadur (2023) and Kangana Ranaut in Emergency (2025).