Growing up in India

Indira Nehru Gandhi was born on 19 November 1917 to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Kamala Nehru and was their only child. The Nehrus were a distinguished Kashmiri Pandit family. At the time of her birth, her grandfather Motilal Nehru and father Jawaharlal were influential political leaders. Gandhi was brought up in an intense political atmosphere at the Nehru family residence, Anand Bhawan, where she spent her childhood years.
Growing up in the sole care of her mother, who was sick and alienated from the Nehru household, Indira developed strong protective instincts and a loner personality. The flurry of political activity in the Nehru household made mixing with her peers difficult. She had personal conflicts with her father's sisters, including Vijayalakshmi Pandit, and these extended into her relationship with them in the political world.In her father's autobiography, Toward FreedomIndira, my four-year-old daughter, was greatly annoyed at this continuous process of despoliation and protested to the police and expressed her strong displeasure. I am afraid those early impressions are likely to colour her future views about the police force generally.
Indira created the Vanara Sena movement for young girls and boys which played a small but notable role in the Indian Independence Movement, conducting protests and flag marches, as well as helping members of the Indian National Congress circulate sensitive publications and banned materials. In an often-told story, she smuggled out in her schoolbag an important document from her father's house under police observation, that outlined plans for a major revolutionary initiative in the early 1930s

Posted by preeti on 9/29/2010 04:28:00 PM. Filed under INDIRA GANDHI . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0