The dynasty: The Nehru - Gandhi story - Jad Adams and Phillip Whitehead

'At the stroke of the midnight hour,' Jawaharlal Nehru announced on 14 August 1947, 'when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.' For most of the half-century that followed, the world's largest democracy has been ruled by him and his descendants.

Nehru's upbringing was European in style and he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. Yet it was he and his father Motilal, along with the great spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi, who spearheaded the movement for Indian independence. his daughter Indira's first memory was the great bonfire of the family's British clothes in support of the freedom movement's call for the rejection of Western values.

Indira was later to assume power and, in turn, groomed her son Sanjay for the succession. She was the world's most powerful woman, victorious in war and peace, who returned in triumph when her political enemies wrote her off as finished. Then came a series of disasters. Within twelve years, Sanjay was killed in a plane crash, Indira was assassinated and her heir as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was blown up by terrorists. Today, nevertheless, the political inheritance of this remarkable family endures.