Day 1. Second place visited - Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum

Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum

The former residence of Indira Gandhi is now a fascinating museum, displaying artefacts, rare photos and newspaper clippings, as well as personal belongings, including the blood-stained sari she was wearing when she was assassinated in 1984, and  the personal moments of the Nehru-Gandhi family and her childhood.. Some of the rooms are preserved as they were, an interesting window into the understated elegance of her life. Another section is devoted to her son Rajiv, also assassinated in 1991 by a suicide bomber. Fragments of the clothes he was wearing and, even more poignantly, his trainers, are on display. On the way out, you pass an enclosed crystal pathway that marks Gandhi’s final footsteps before her murder.
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (née Nehru; 19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was the third Prime Minister of India and a central figure of the Indian National Congress party. Gandhi, who served from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, is the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of India and the only woman to hold the office.

Indira Gandhi was the only child of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She served as the Chief of Staff of her father's highly centralized administration between 1947 and 1964 and came to wield considerable unofficial influence in government. Elected Congress President in 1959, she was offered the premiership in succession to her father. Gandhi refused and instead chose to become a cabinet minister in the government. She finally consented to become Prime Minister in succession to Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966.

As Prime Minister, Gandhi became known for her political ruthlessness and unprecedented centralisation of power. She presided over a period where India emerged with greater power than before to become the regional hegemon of South Asia with considerable political, economic, and military developments. Gandhi also presided over a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977 during which she ruled by decree and made lasting changes to the constitution of India. She was assassinated in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star.