Foreign policy

Gandhi invited the late Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Shimla for a week-long summit. After the near-failure of the talks, the two heads of state eventually signed the Shimla Agreement, which bound the two countries to resolve the Kashmir dispute by negotiations and peaceful means. Due to her antipathy for Nixon, relations with the United States grew distant, while relations with the Soviet Union grew closer.
She was criticized by some for not making the Line of Control a permanent border while a few critics even believed that Pakistan-administered Kashmir should have been extracted from Pakistan, whose 93, 000 prisoners of war were under Indian control. But the agreement did remove immediate United Nations and third party interference, and greatly reduced the likelihood of Pakistan launching a major attack in the near future. By not demanding total capitulation on a sensitive issue from Bhutto, she had allowed Pakistan to stabilize and normalize. Trade relations were also normalized, though much contact remained frozen(sealed) for years.
Devaluation of the rupee
During the late 1960s, Gandhi's administration decreed a 40% devaluation in the value of the Indian rupee from 4 to 7 to the United States dollar to boost trade

Posted by preeti on 9/28/2010 05:56:00 PM. Filed under INDIRA GANDHI . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0