Indira’s assassination felt like a personal blow

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s ode to former PM Indira Gandhi on her birth anniversary. “Honouring the towering legacy of our late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose 108th birthday anniversary is today. Much has been (&will be) written about her decisive leadership in redrawing the map of the subcontinent in 1971 and (less admiringly) of the Emergency four years later, so today I will confine myself to the personal.

“My late grandmother Mundarath Jayasankini Amma was born on the very same day as Mrs Gandhi, which created a strange kind of affinity in our household. I met the PM as an 18-year-old Student Union President of St Stephen’s College in 1974, & subsequently interviewed her for a Swiss youth magazine (see pic). When she lost the 1977 elections I interviewed her again at great length in two hour-long sessions on her foreign policy for my doctoral dissertation, which was later published as my book “Reasons of State”.

“Even though I was a critic of the Emergency, as reflected in my books, her assassination felt like a personal blow. Today one remembers a figure who left a major imprint, for good and ill, on modern India’s history. Remembering #IndiraGandhi.” The Congress on Wednesday paid rich tributes to former prime minister Indira Gandhi on her birth anniversary, with Rahul Gandhi saying that he was inspired by his grandmother to make fearless decisions for India. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and former party chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi paid floral tributes to Indira Gandhi at her memorial, Shakti Sthal, in New Delhi.

In a post on X, Kharge said the exemplary and dynamic leadership of Indira Gandhi, showing immense political courage, will forever inspire.