Feroze Gandhi- Life and Leadership

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Feroze Gandhi was a prominent freedom fighter, politician, Member of Parliament and journalist and publisher of the The National Herald and The Navjivan newspapers and above all, a crusader against corruption.

Feroze Jehangir Gandhi was born on 12 September, 1912 in Bombay, in a Parsi family from Gujarat. He was the youngest of the five children of Fareedoon Jehangir Gandhi, a marine engineer, and Rattimai Hatta. His family had migrated to Bombay from Bharuch in South Gujarat, their ancestral home. In early 1920s, after the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Allahabad to live with an unmarried aunt, Shirin Commissariat, a surgeon at the city's Lady Dufferin Hospital. He attended the Vidya Mandir High School and then graduated from the British- staffed Ewing Christian College. He went on to study at the London School of Economics.

In 1930, he abandoned his studies to join the independence movement. He was imprisoned, along with Lal Bahadur Shastri. Later, while working closely with Pundit Nehru, he was involved with the agrarian, no-rent campaign in the United Province (now Uttar Pradesh) and was imprisoned twice. Feroze got close to the Nehru family. In the following years, Indira and Feroze grew closer to each other, while in England. They married in 1942. The couple were arrested and jailed during the Quit India Movement. Later, they had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay.

After independence, Pt. Nehru became the first Prime Minister of India. Feroze and Indira settled in Allahabad for some time. Later, Feroze became Managing Director of The National Herald, a newspaper founded by his father in law He was also the first chairman of Indian Oil Corporation Limited. After being a member of the provincial assembly, Feroze Gandhi won independent India's first general elections in 1952, from Rae Bareli constituency in Uttar Pradesh.

Feroze Gandhi soon became a prominent figure in his own right, criticising the government of his father-in-law and beginning a fight against corruption. In the years after independence, many Indian business houses had become close to political leaders, and some of them had started various financial irregularities. In a case, exposed by Feroze Gandhi in 1955, he revealed how Ram Kishan Dalmia, as chairman of a bank and an insurance company used those companies to fund his takeover of Bennett and Coleman Co. and started transferring money illegally from publicly-held companies for his own benefit. In 1957, he was re-elected from Rae Bareli. In the parliament in 1958, he raised the Haridas Mundhra scandal, involving the government controlled Life Insurance Company. This was a huge embarrassment to the clean image of Nehru's government and eventually led to the resignation of the (then) Finance Minister TT Krishnamachari.

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