Born in 1917 in an India still under British rule, Indira Gandhi was the only child of India’s founding father Jawaharlal Nehru — a central player in India’s independence movement and the nation’s first prime minister after it won its freedom from the British Empire, serving continuously from 1947 to 1964.
Gandhi’s rise to the top was written in the stars, and seems almost coincidental and circumstantial. Many believe she was destined to rule India, that her rise to power was inevitable.
Gandhi studied at Somerville College at the University of Oxford and joined the Congress Party in 1938, ascending to its working committee in 1959. From here she continued to climb higher and higher up the ranks of the party. Then, in 1964, everything changed. Following her father’s death, the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, appointed her as the minister of information and broadcasting. But when Shastri died unexpectedly, to the surprise of some and in a compromise between divided factions of the party it was Gandhi who was named the new leader of the Congress Party and the new prime minister of India. How much of her takeover was planned and meticulously strategised, and how much of it was merely accidental in the face of unexpected circumstances, we may never fully know.