Indira Gandhi left major imprint, for good and ill, on modern India's history: Tharoor

New Delhi, Nov 19 (PTI) Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday honoured the "towering legacy" of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on her birth anniversary and said "today, one remembers a figure who left a major imprint, for good and ill, on modern India's history".

The former Union minister said even though he was a critic of the Emergency, Gandhi's assassination felt like a "personal blow".

"Honouring the towering legacy of our late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose 108th birthday anniversary is today. Much has been (&will be) written about her decisive leadership in redrawing the map of the subcontinent in 1971 and (less admiringly) of the Emergency four years later, so today I will confine myself to the personal," Tharoor said on X.

"My late grandmother Mundarath Jayasankini Amma was born on the very same day as Mrs Gandhi, which created a strange kind of affinity in our household. I met the PM as an 18-year-old Student Union President of St Stephen's College in 1974, & subsequently interviewed her for a Swiss youth magazine," he said.

When she lost the 1977 elections, Tharoor said, he interviewed her again at great length in two hour-long sessions on her foreign policy for his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as his book "Reasons of State".

"Even though I was a critic of the Emergency, as reflected in my books, her assassination felt like a personal blow. Today, one remembers a figure who left a major imprint, for good and ill, on modern India's history," the Congress leader said.

Born on November 19, 1917, Indira Gandhi served as the prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination on October 31, 1984. PTI ASK RHL