India Remembers Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi On 27th Death Anniversary-Featured, India

Today the whole country remebered former Prime Minister Indra Gandhi on her 27th Death Anniversary today with the President Mrs. Pratibha Patil leading the nation. President floral tributes at Shakti Sthal the memorial of Gandhi on Monday morning. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were also present on the occasion. Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna, Union Ministers Vilasrao Deshmukh, Kamal Nath, K V Thomas, N Narayana Swamy and Krishna Tirath and senior Congress leaders Motilal Vohra, Manishankar Aiyar were also present. Devotional songs were played at the venue as the dignitaries sat at Shakti Sthal after paying tributes to the late leader. A speech by Indira Gandhi was also played on the occasion.

Mrs. Indra Gandhi

“If I die a violent death as some fear and a few are plotting, I know the violence will be in the thought and the action of the assassin, not in my dying……!”

In her words there was courage, belief and faith. Mrs.Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, who served as the prime minister of India for three consecutive terms (1966-77) and a fourth term (1980-84) was assassinated on 31 October in 1984. 27 years ago, she was assassinated by her own bodyguards— Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, who fired 33 bullets into her chest and abdomen, killing her at her own residence on October 31, 1984. Beant was killed in the gun fire. Satwant Singh was arrested and later sentenced to death along with conspirator Kehar Singh. The sentence was carried out on 6 January, 1989. At twelve years of age, Indira became the leader of a children’s group, whose purpose was to help end British control in India. In 1938, Indira finally joined the Indian National Congress Party. In 1942, she married journalist Feroze Gandhi. Soon after the couple was married, they were sent to prison on charges of subversion by the British. Indira Gandhi encouraged and started a family planning program, she also promoted the views of Nehru to establish India’s stability and security interests as independent from those of the nuclear superpowers, by authorizing the development of nuclear weapons in 1967. She was also the leader who transformed India’s chronic food shortages into surplus production of wheat, rice, cotton and milk through the Green Revolution. However, Gandhi was also the only Indian Prime Minister to have declared a state of emergency in order to ‘rule by decree’ and the only Indian Prime Minister to have been imprisoned after holding that office. She became unpopular among the masses after implementing ‘emergency’ and the general feeling was that she used the emergency provisions to grant herself extraordinary powers. On Nehru’s death in 1964, Gandhi was elected to Parliament in his place. After acting as Minister of Information and Broadcasting (1964-6), Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister on the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966. In 1971, her popularity made her win again by an enormous margin. The second female in the world to hold the office of prime minister, after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi remains the world’s second longest serving female Prime Minister as of 2011