India's only female prime minister and its dominant political figure for nearly two decades, who championed the poor with her 'Garibi Hatao' (abolish poverty) politics, nationalized banks, and led India to a decisive victory in the 1971 war that helped create Bangladesh, then in 1975 declared a state of Emergency that suspended civil liberties, jailed the opposition, and censored the press — the gravest assault on Indian democracy by an elected leader — before her 1984 assassination by two of her Sikh bodyguards, months after she ordered the army into the Golden Temple, set off anti-Sikh massacres that killed thousands.
In June 1975, a court found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice involving the misuse of government machinery and barred her from office. She was the most powerful person in India. Rather than step down, she advised the president to declare a state of emergency. Within hours, opposition leaders were being arrested in their beds, newspapers found censors in their offices, and the world's largest democracy stopped functioning as one. She was not a general who had seized a palace. She was an elected prime minister, the daughter of India's founding leader, and she did it with the machinery of the constitution itself. Nine years later, two of her own bodyguards shot her in her garden. The question her life leaves behind is the hardest one a democracy can ask: how much power should one leader be allowed to hold?