Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Vijayalakshmi Pandit

Swarup Nehru

Dehradun, India

1954-61

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was born in 1900 to lawyer and former President of the Indian National Congress, Motilal Nehru, and Swarup Rani, in Allahabad, India. Her older brother was Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of independent India. Her younger sister was Krishna Hutheesing, a writer. In 1921 she married a barrister, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, who died in prison in 1944. They had three daughters, Chandralekha Mehta, Nayantara Sehgal and Rita Dar.

Pandit’s political career was extensive and impressive. It began with her becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet post in pre-independence India, when she was elected as the member of parliament in 1937 for the Cawnpore Bilhaur constituency. In the same year, she was elected minister of local self-government and public health in the United Provinces, a post she held again in 1938, 1946 and 1947. She was involved in pro-independence movements, for which she was jailed in 1931, 1940 and 1942 for time periods ranging from seven to eighteen months.

Pandit also held many diplomatic positions. She led the Indian delegation to the United Nations in 1946, becoming the first woman to do so, leading it until 1968. Between 1947 and 1949 she was the Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union, and later to the United States and Mexico from 1949 to 1951. In 1951, she was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, for Allahabad. Pandit resigned within a year upon her appointment as President of the General Assembly from 1953 to 1954. She would return to the Lok Sabha for Allahabad in the 1964-1969 term, after serving for three years as governor of Maharashtra between 1962 and 1964.

Her time in the United Kingdom began in 1954, when she was appointed as the Indian High Commissioner. She held this position until 1961, while at the same working as the Indian Ambassador to Ireland (1955-61) and to Spain (1956-61). She was also appointed an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Throughout her career, she vocally criticised British imperialism and western geopolitical dominance.

In the final decade of her career, Pandit developed strenuous relationships with V. K. Krishna Menon, a close advisor of her brother during his presidency, and later with her niece Indira Gandhi, during Gandhi’s first presidency (1966-77). Pandit came out of retirement in 1977 specifically to campaign against her niece, a campaign that successfully ousted her. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit fully stepped away from politics at the end of the 1970s. She died on 1 December 1990, in Dehradun, India.