Indira Gandhi Quotes

There can be no effective solution of the Indian food problem that does not include population control.

I went to London in the '70s and also visited Madame Tussauds there. At that time, the only Indian figure that was exhibited there was of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's.

My aim has always been to defend the secular foundation of our nation and the poor of our country - the creed sacred to Indiraji and Rajivji.

In 1971, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi defeated Pakistan, and our leader, A. B. Vajpayee, who was in the Opposition, praised her, and she was credited with the military victory, similarly, why can't Prime Minister Narendra Modi be credited for the Balakot air strike?

I had no time for Indira Gandhi. She was too much in the Russian camp for my liking.

See, Indira Gandhi was wrong in declaring the Emergency. She tried to put me in jail, but she could not. People voted her back, and I worked with her after that. Even though I was not a member of the Congress, she sought my help on China. You can't have personal vendetta, you see.

Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi can rightly boast of having won a war, but if she won it, she should first of all thank Yahya Khan and his gang of illiterate psychopaths.

Besides the things I asked [Indira Gandhi], she told me about her son Rajiv, who is married to an Italian girl and is a pilot for Air India, then of her younger son Sanjay, who is an automobile designer and still a bachelor.

Finally [Indira Ganhi] called a beautiful dark little boy who was playing on the lawn, and embracing him tenderly, murmured, 'This is my grandchild; this is the man I love most in the world.' It was a strange sensation to watch this very powerful woman embracing a child.

Sometimes I ask myself whether [Indira Gandhi] had, even then, a certain contempt for the system she represented and, years later, would overthrow.

Did Indira Gandhi ask for somebody's permission to carry out the test in 1974?

In 1978, when I was a non-Congress chief minister, we distributed surplus wheat among labourers. Later, when we visited a village, I asked a labourer whether he knew who sent the wheat. 'Yes, Indiraji - only Indiraji helps the poor.' Indiraji was a symbol for the weaker sections.

Indiraji should have been here today, speaking to you in her gentle, impassioned voice. One with Bharatmata's immortal spirit, she now shines as a lodestar not only for us but for all humanity.

Prime ministers with full majority have behaved differently from each other. Jawaharlal Nehru was a leader who ruled by consensus while Indira Gandhi was considered more unilateral in her approach.

The importance of the leader has always mattered, whether it was Indira Gandhi, V. P. Singh, or Narendra Modi.

Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed...she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India.

The common denominator of the great women leaders in the world - Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir - is that they're dramatically nonsexual.

I was a very good friend of Rajiv Gandhi, and I had affection for Sonia as his wife.

I would love to play Indira Gandhi.

I met Indira Gandhi in her office in the government palace. The same office that had been her father's - large, cold and plain. She was sitting, small and slender, behind a bare desk. When I entered, she got up and came forward to give me her hand, then sat down again and cut the preliminaries short by fixing me with a gaze that meant: Go ahead with the first question, don't waste time, I really have no time to waste.

The same goes for the refugees. Mrs.[Indira] Gandhi says ten million. It's obvious she started with that figure in order to legalize her offensive and invade East Pakistan. But when we invited the United Nations to check, the Indians were opposed. Why were they opposed? If the figure were exact, they shouldn't have been afraid of its being verified.

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.

Operation Bluestar was a mischievous blunder, and it should not have been done.

I am not too much into political awareness, but I had known a lot about Indira Gandhi's strong persona. Obviously, she had a powerful personality and a lot of clarity and wisdom to rule India for so long.

It was Indira Gandhi who very much lined up with the Russians. And she was, you know, within the Commonwealth, basically one out on that. The first meeting in 1983 was held in India and I was very off put by her. I just couldn't abide her, basically.