Feroze Gandhi

Feroze Gandhi, who came into the limelight by marrying Indira Gandhi, daughter of first Indian prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is a forgotten component in the history of Indian politics. He died in 1960. The cause was heart failure. Had he been alive, then - according to his followers - he and not his wife Indira Gandhi would have become the Prime Minister of India after Lal Bahadur Shastri. One argument in order to support this belief is that the affable and democratic Feroze Gandhi was much more popular with the people than his aristocratic wife. Another argument is that Lal Bahadur Shastri, on whom Indira Gandhi looked down, was a good friend of Feroze. Because of that, Shastri would rather have chosen Feroze than Indira as a member of his cabinet.

Another opinion about Feroze is, that he in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, was "the inofficial leader of the opposition". Feroze belonged to the Congress party. His father-in-law Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India, but the opposition from other parties in the Lok Sabha was so weak, that a democratic void was created. Even though Feroze Gandhi was a member of the governing party, he showed tendencies to fill that void with his active presence in the parliament.