Neelam Sanjiva Reddy

Sixth President of India

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy : (19 May 1913 – 1 June 1996) was the sixth President of India, serving from 1977 to 1982. Over the course of a long political career, Reddy held several key offices, as the first and two-time Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, a two-time Speaker of the Lok Sabha and Union Minister. He remains the only person to be elected to the office of the President of India unopposed.

Education and family

Reddy was born in Illur village in Madras Presidency in the present day Anantapur districtof Andhra Pradesh. He had his Primary Education at the High School run by Theosophical Society Adyar, Madras. He joined the Government Arts College at Anantapur, then an affiliate of the University of Madras for his higher studies. Much later, in 1958, the degree of Honorary Doctor of Laws was conferred on him by the Sri Venkateswara University,Tirupati.

Reddy was married to Neelam Nagaratnamma (wife). The couple had one son and three daughters.

Political career

Reddy was elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly in 1946 and became the Secretary of the Madras Congress Legislature Party. He was also a Member of the Indian Constituent Assembly which framed the Constitution of India. From April 1949 till April 1951, he served as the Minister for Prohibition, Housing and Forests of the then Madras State.

Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh

In 1951 he was elected President of the Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee.

Congress President and Union Minister

Reddy was elected President of the Indian National Congress thrice consecutively at its Bangalore, Bhavnagar and Patna sessions from 1960 to 1962. 7 in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet.

Speaker of the Lok Sabha

In the general elections of 1967, Reddy was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh. On 17 March 1967, Reddy was elected Speaker of the Fourth Lok Sabha.

President of India

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy was elected, unopposed, on 21 July 1977 and was sworn in as the sixth President of India on 25 July 1977. During his term of office, Reddy had to work with three governments under Prime Ministers Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi. Barely a month into office Reddy announced on the eve of India's thirtieth anniversary of Independence that he would be moving out of the Rashtrapati Bhawan to a smaller accommodation and that he would be taking a 70% pay cut in solidarity with India's impoverished masses.

Retirement and death

Reddy was succeeded as President by Giani Zail Singh who was sworn in as President on 25 July 1982. In his farewell address to the nation, President Reddy criticised the failure of successive governments in improving the lives of the Indian masses and called for the emergence of a strong political opposition to prevent governmental misrule. Following his presidential term, the then Chief Minister of Karnataka Ramakrishna Hegde invited Reddy to settle down in Bangalore but he chose to retire to his farm in Anantapur. He died of pneumonia in Bangalore in 1996 at the age of 83. His samadhi is at Kallahalli near Bangalore. Parliament mourned Reddy's death on 11 June 1996 and members cutting across party lines paid him tribute and recalled his contributions to the nation and the House.

Reddy authored a book, Without Fear or Favour : Reminiscences and Reflections of a President, published in 1989. In 2004, a statue of his was erected at the Secretariat in Hyderabad. The character of chief minister Mahendranath in former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao's novel, The Insider, draws on Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy's career in Andhra Pradesh and his political rivalry with Kasu Brahmananda Reddy. While the book portrayed him as a serial fornicator, Ramnika Gupta, a CPI(M) trade unionist and politician, accused Reddy of having raped her when she met him at an AICC session to discuss the nationalisation of mines in Dhanbad.

The Postal Department of India released a commemorative stamp and special cover in honour of Reddy on the occasion of his birth centenary. The Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy College Of Education in Hyderabad has been named after him. As part of the centenary celebrations of his birth, the Government of Andhra Pradesh has announced that it will rename the Andhra Pradesh State Revenue Academy, Reddy's alma mater the Government Arts College, Anantapur and the Government Medical College, Anantapur after the former president.

Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi:- was born on November 19, 1917, in Allahabad, India. Gandhi was born into the politically prominent Nehru family; her father, Jawaharlal Nehru served as India’s first prime minister. Gandhi served three consecutive terms as prime minister, between 1966 and 1977, and another term beginning in 1980. In 1984, Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. 

EARLY LIFE

The only child of Jawaharlal Nehru and the first prime minister of independent India, Indira Gandhi was born on November 19, 1917. A stubborn and highly intelligent young woman, she enjoyed an excellent education in Swiss schools and at Somerville College, Oxford. 

After her mother died, in 1936, Gandhi became something of her father's hostess, learning to navigate complex relationships of diplomacy with some of the great leaders of the world. 

POLITICAL CARR 
Gandhi was Elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1960. After her father’s death, Gandhi was appointed minister of information and broadcasting. When her father’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died abruptly in 1966, India’s congress appointed her to the post of prime minister. 

She surprised her father’s old colleagues when she led with a strong hand, sacking some of highest-ranking officials. Gandhi subsequently brought about great change in agricultural programs that improved the lot of her country’s poor. For a time, she was hailed as a hero. 

DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS 

In 1971, the Pakistan army conducted violent acts against the people of East Pakistan. Nearly 10 million people fled to India. Gandhi invited the Pakistani president to Shimla for a weeklong summit. 

The two leaders eventually signed the Shimla Agreement, agreeing to resolve the dispute of Kashmir by peaceful means. Her work eventually led to the creation of the new and independent nation of Bangladesh. 

Gandhi also led a movement that became known as the Green Revolution. In an effort to address the chronic food shortages that mainly affected the extremely poor Sikh farmers of the Punjab region, Gandhi decided to increase crop diversification and food exports as a way out of the problem, creating new jobs as well as food for her countrymen. 

AUTHORITARIAN LEANINGS AND IMPRISONMENT 

Despite these advancements, Gandhi ruled with an authoritarian hand, and corruption boiled within her congress and her national and state governments. In 1977, the high courts found her guilty of a minor infraction during the year’s elections and called for her resignation. Gandhi responded by requesting that the president call for a state of emergency. 

Gandhi lost the next election and was later imprisoned. In 1980, the country responded differently and she won by a landslide majority. That same year, her son Sanjay Gandhi (b. 1946), who had been serving as her chief political adviser, died in a plane crash in New Delhi. After Sanjay's death, Indira prepared her other son, Rajiv (b. 1944), for leadership. 

ASSASSINATION

During the 1980s, a Sikh separatist movement developed in India, which Gandhi attempted to repress. 

Sikh extremists held a campaign inside the Golden Temple, and Gandhi ordered some 70,000 soldiers to purge the sacred space. More than 450 people died. 

On October 31, 1984, a trusted bodyguard, who was a Sikh, pulled out a .38 revolver and shot her point-blank. Another bodyguard, also a Sikh, then took out an automatic weapon and shot 30 rounds into her body. Gandhi died on the way to the hospital.

Chacha Nehru

Independent India’s first prime minister

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, India. In 1919, he joined the Indian National Congress and joined Indian Nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement. In 1947, Pakistan was created as a new, independent country for Muslims. The British withdrew and Nehru became Independent India’s first prime minister. He died on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi, India. 

LIFE

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad, India in 1889. His father was a renowned lawyer and one of Mahatma Gandhi's notable lieutenants. A series of English governesses and tutors educated Nehru at home until he was 16. He continued his education in England, first at the Harrow School and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned an honors degree in natural science. He later studied law at the Inner Temple in London before returning home to India in 1912 and practicing law for several years. Four years later, Nehru married Kamala Kaul; their only child, Indira Priyadarshini, was born in 1917. Like her father, Indira would later serve as prime minister of India under her married name: Indira Gandhi. A family of high achievers, one of Nehru's sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, later became the first woman president of the UN General Assembly. 

ENTERING POLITICS 

In 1919, while traveling on a train, Nehru overheard British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer gloating over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The massacre, also known as the Massacre of Amritsar, was an incident in which 379 people were killed and at least 1,200 wounded when the British military stationed there continuously fired for ten minutes on a crowd of unarmed Indians. Upon hearing Dyer’s words, Nehru vowed to fight the British. The incident changed the course of his life. 

This period in Indian history was marked by a wave of nationalist activity and governmental repression. Nehru joined the Indian National Congress, one of India's two major political parties. Nehru was deeply influenced by the party's leader,Mahatma Gandhi. It was Gandhi's insistence on action to bring about change and greater autonomy from the British that sparked Nehru's interest the most. 

The British didn't give in easily to Indian demands for freedom, and in late 1921, the Congress Party's central leaders and workers were banned from operating in some provinces. Nehru went to prison for the first time as the ban took effect; over the next 24 years he was to serve a total of nine sentences, adding up to more than nine years in jail. Always leaning to the left politically, Nehru studied Marxism while imprisoned. Though he found himself interested in the philosophy but repelled by some of its methods, from then on the backdrop of Nehru's economic thinking was Marxist, adjusted as necessary to Indian conditions. 

MARCHING TOWARD INDIAN INDEPENDENCE

In 1928, after years of struggle on behalf of Indian emancipation, Jawaharlal Nehru was named president of the Indian National Congress. (In fact, hoping that Nehru would attract India's youth to the party, Mahatma Gandhi had engineered Nehru's rise.) The next year, Nehru led the historic session at Lahore that proclaimed complete independence as India's political goal. 

November 1930 saw the start of the Round Table Conferences, which convened in London and hosted British and Indian officials working toward a plan of eventual independence. 

After his father's death in 1931, Nehru became more embedded in the workings of the Congress Party and became closer to Gandhi, attending the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Signed in March 1931 by Gandhi and the British viceroy Lord Irwin, the pact declared a truce between the British and India's independence movement. The British agreed to free all political prisoners and Gandhi agreed to end the civil disobedience movement he had been coordinating for years. 

Unfortunately, the pact did not instantly usher in a peaceful climate in British-controlled India, and both Nehru and Gandhi were jailed in early 1932 on charges of attempting to mount another civil disobedience movement. Neither man attended the third Round Table Conference. (Gandhi was jailed soon after his return as the sole Indian representative attending the second Round Table Conference.) The third and final conference did, however, result in the Government of India Act of 1935, giving the Indian provinces a system of autonomous government in which elections would be held to name provincial leaders. 

By the time the 1935 act was signed into law, Indians began to see Nehru as natural heir to Gandhi, who didn’t designate Nehru as his political successor until the early 1940s. Gandhi said in January 1941, "[Jawaharlal Nehru and I] had differences from the time we became co-workers and yet I have said for some years and say so now that ... Jawaharlal will be my successor." 

THE FIRST PRIME MINISTER OF INDEPENDENT INDIA

Domestic Policy 

The importance of Jawaharlal Nehru in the context of Indian history can be distilled to the following points: he imparted modern values and thought, stressed secularism, insisted upon the basic unity of India, and, in the face of ethnic and religious diversity, carried India into the modern age of scientific innovation and technological progress. He also prompted social concern for the marginalized and poor and respect for democratic values. 

Nehru was especially proud to reform the antiquated Hindu civil code. Finally Hindu widows could enjoy equality with men in matters of inheritance and property. Nehru also changed Hindu law to criminalize caste discrimination. 

Nehru's administration established many Indian institutions of higher learning, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the National Institutes of Technology, and guaranteed in his five-year plans free and compulsory primary education to all of India's children. 

National Security and International Policy

The Kashmir region—which was claimed by both India and Pakistan—was a perennial problem throughout Nehru's leadership, and his cautious efforts to settle the dispute ultimately failed, resulting in Pakistan making an unsuccessful attempt to seize Kashmir by force in 1948. The region has remained in dispute into the 21st century. 

Internationally, starting in the late 1940s, both the United States and the U.S.S.R. began seeking out India as an ally in the Cold War, but Nehru led efforts toward a "nonalignment policy," by which India and other nations wouldn’t feel the need to tie themselves to either dueling country to thrive. To this end, Nehru co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement of nations professing neutrality. 

Recognizing the People's Republic of China soon after its founding, and as a strong supporter of the United Nations, Nehru argued for China’s inclusion in the UN and sought to establish warm and friendly relations with the neighboring country. His pacifist and inclusive policies with respect to China came undone when border disputes led to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, which ended when China declared a ceasefire on November 20, 1962 and announced its withdrawal from the disputed area in the Himalayas. 

LEGACY 

Nehru's four pillars of domestic policies were democracy, socialism, unity, and secularism, and he largely succeeded in maintaining a strong foundation of all four during his tenure as president. While serving his country, he enjoyed iconic status and was widely admired internationally for his idealism and statesmanship. His birthday, November 14, is celebrated in India as Baal Divas ("Children's Day") in recognition of his lifelong passion and work on behalf of children and young people. 

Nehru's only child, Indira, served as India's prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 to 1984, when she was assassinated. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister from 1984 to 1989, when he was also assassinated.