Tharoor honours Indira Gandhi’s ‘towering legacy’ on her birth anniversary, shares personal bond

Marking her 108th birth anniversary, Tharoor wrote on X that while much has been said about Gandhi’s decisive leadership during the 1971 Bangladesh War and her controversial declaration of the Emergency, he wanted to share a more personal connection.

"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," he wrote.

Tharoor recalled that his grandmother and Indira Gandhi shared the same birth date, creating a sense of affinity at home.

He first met Gandhi in 1974 as an 18-year-old Student Union President at St Stephen’s College, later interviewing her for a Swiss youth magazine.

After her defeat in the 1977 elections, he interviewed her again in two extended sessions on foreign policy for his doctoral dissertation, which eventually became his 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,” he said.

“Today, one remembers a figure who left a major imprint, for good and ill, on modern India’s history.”

Indira Gandhi, born on November 19, 1917, served as India’s Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984.