Indira Gandhi, world’s longest serving woman prime minister, has been ranked by the Time magazine as the ninth most powerful woman of the past century, a list that also includes Mother Teresa.
The list of ’25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century’ is topped by Jane Addams, an outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage, who was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ranked sixth on the list.
Besides Gandhi and Mother Teresa, who is ranked 22nd, no other woman from the sub-continent figures in the Time magazine list released on Friday.
“She was the nation’s daughter, brought up under the close watch of both her father Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India’s first Prime Minister after decades of British rule, and her country,” the Time magazine said.
When Gandhi was elected prime minister in 1966, a TIME cover line had read, ‘Troubled India in a Woman’s Hands’.
“Those steady hands went on to steer India, not without controversy, for much of the next two decades through recession, famine, the detonation of the nation’s first atomic bomb, a corruption scandal and a civil war in neighbouring Pakistan that, under her guidance, led to the creation of a new state, Bangladesh,” the Time said.
She served three consecutive terms from 1966 to 1977 and was in the middle of her fourth term from 1980 when she was assassinated in 1984.
By the time she was assassinated, Gandhi was the world’s longest-serving woman prime minister, a distinction she holds to this day, the magazine said.
The list of 25 also includes Marie Curie, Madonna, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey and Virginia Woolf.
On Mother Teresa, the magazine said: “Born Agnes Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents living under the Ottoman Empire, the petite nun made her way to India in 1929, building her start-up missionary community of 13 members in Kolkata into a global network of more than 4,000 sisters running orphanages and AIDS hospices”.
“Sometimes criticised for lacking adequate medical training, not addressing poverty on a grander scale, actively opposing birth control and abortion and even cozying up to dictators, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize nonetheless inspired countless volunteers to serve, and will wear her white habit all the way to Catholic sainthood,” it said.
