Indira Gandhi
The State Emergency To this day, the name of Indira Gandhi arouses either admiration or contempt, depending on who you talk to in India . While the daughter of Pandit Nehru is remembered for being the only lady to become Prime Minister, she is also hated for the action she undertook when in 1975, she declared a national state of emergency and violated many human rights, not the least being a mass vasectomy that was sanctioned by her son, Sanjay Gandhi . One of her best-known idioms was "you cannot shake hands with a closed fist."