Indian politicians are unrivaled in the world. India is a diverse parliamentary democracy with a large population. The rest of the planet was doomed from the start. Let’s head on to the list and check out the Indian politicians in their younger days.
1. Akhilesh Yadav
Akhilesh Yadav is a member of the Samajwadi Party and an active politician. He is Uttar Pradesh’s 20th Chief Minister. Yadav was born in Saifai, Etawah District, Uttar Pradesh, on July 1, 1973. Malti Devi and Mulayam Singh Yadav, the subsequent Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, were his parents.
2. Abdul Kalam
Next on our list of Indian politicians is Abdul Kalam. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was born on October 15, 1931, in the pilgrimage center of Rameswaram on Pamban Island, then in the Madras Presidency, and now in the state of Tamil Nadu, to a Tamil Muslim family. He was elected President of the United States in 2002. His term was from July 25, 2002, to July 25, 2007. He was affectionately regarded as the People’s President throughout his presidency.
3. Arvind Kejriwal
Arvind Kejriwal is another one of the most renowned Indian politicians. Since February 2015, Arvind Kejriwal, a former bureaucrat, and activist, has served as the 7th Chief Minister of Delhi. On August 16, 1968, Kejriwal was born into an Agrawal family in Siwani, Bhiwani district, Haryana, as the first of Gobind Ram Kejriwal and Gita Devi’s three children. His father was a Birla Institute of Technology Mesra graduate who worked as an electrical engineer.
4. Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was an Indian politician who served as Prime Minister of India for three periods, the first for 13 days in 1996, then for 13 months from 1998 to 1999, and finally for a full term from 1999 to 2004. Vajpayee was a co-founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a key leader of the party (BJP). Vajpayee joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a member in 1942 when he was 16 years old (RSS).
5. Amit Shah
Amit Anil Chandra Shah is an Indian politician who is now the Minister of Home Affairs and the country’s first Minister of Cooperation. From 2014 to 2020, he was the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since 2014, he has also served as the chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). In the 2019 Indian general elections, he was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, from Gandhinagar.
6. Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi was one of the most important Indian politicians who played a key role in the Indian National Congress. She was India’s third prime minister and the country’s first and only female prime minister to date. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had a daughter named Gandhi. She was Prime Minister of India twice, from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 to October 1984, giving her the second longest-serving Indian Prime Minister behind her father.
7. Jayalalitha
Jayaram Jayalalithaa was an Indian politician and actor who served as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu six times between 1991 and 2016, covering a period of more than fourteen years. She served as the general secretary of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) from February 9, 1989, a Dravidian party whose members referred to her as “Amma” (Mother) and “Puratchi Thalaivi” (Revolutionary leader).
9. Maneka Gandhi
Maneka Sanjay Gandhi (sometimes written Menaka; née Anand) is an Indian politician, animal rights campaigner, and environmentalist who was born on August 26, 1956. She is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a member of the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament (BJP). Sanjay Gandhi, an Indian politician, is her husband’s widow.
10. Mayawati
Mayawati is a politician and social reformer from India. She has served as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh four times. She is the national president of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which advocates for Bahujans, also known as Other Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes, as well as converted minorities from these castes, through a platform of social transformation. She served as chief minister from 1995 to 1997, then from 2002 to 2003, and again from 2007 to 2012.
11. Manmohan Singh
Next on the list of Indian politicians is Manmohan Singh. He is a politician, economist, and scholar who served as India’s 13th Prime Minister from 2004 to 2014. He is currently a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament, representing the state of Rajasthan. Singh, a member of the Indian National Congress, was India’s first Sikh Prime Minister. Singh was also the first prime minister to be re-elected after serving a complete five-year term since Jawaharlal Nehru.
12. Narendra Modi
Narendra Damodardas Modi is an Indian politician who has been the country’s fourteenth and current Prime Minister since 2014. Modi served as Gujarat’s chief minister from 2001 to 2014 and is a Varanasi Member of Parliament. He is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). He is also a member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary volunteer organization.
13. Rahul Gandhi
Rahul Gandhi is another one of the Indian politicians who serve in the Indian Parliament. He is a member of the 17th Lok Sabha, representing the Wayanad seat in Kerala. He was a member of the Indian National Congress and served as the party’s president from 16 December 2017 until 3 July 2019. Gandhi is the head of the Indian Youth Congress and the National Students Union of India, as well as a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
14. Sonia Gandhi
Sonia Gandhi is a politician from India. She is the president of the Indian National Congress, a broad-based political party that has ruled India for the majority of the country’s post-independence history. She became the party’s leader in 1998, seven years after Rajiv Gandhi, her husband and India’s former Prime Minister, was assassinated and stayed in government for the next twenty-two years. After her son, Rahul Gandhi resigned, she returned to the post in 2019.
15. Raj Thackeray
Raj Thackeray is an Indian politician and the chairperson of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), a regional political organization. He was born Swararaj Shrikant Thackeray. He is Bal Thackeray’s nephew and cousin to Shiv Sena president and Maharashtra’s 19th and current Chief Minister, Uddhav Thackeray.
16. Sharad Pawar
Sharad Govindrao Pawar is next on our list of Indian politicians. On three occasions, he has served as Maharashtra’s Chief Minister. He has served in the Indian government as Minister of Defence and Minister of Agriculture. He is the president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which he created after leaving the Indian National Congress in 1999. He is the leader of the NCP delegation in the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament. Maha Vikas Aghadi is his organization’s chairperson.
17. Smriti Irani
Smriti Zubin Irani is a former television actress and producer who is now an Indian politician. Since May 2019, she has served as India’s Minister of Women and Child Development in the Union Cabinet. She is a Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha, representing Amethi, and is a key leader within the Bharatiya Janata Party.
18. Priyanka Gandhi
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is a politician from India who serves as the general secretary of the All India Congress Committee in Uttar Pradesh. She is a member of the politically powerful Nehru-Gandhi family, as the daughter of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, the sister of Rahul Gandhi, and the granddaughter of Feroze and Indira Gandhi. She is also a member of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation’s board of trustees.
19. Subramanian Swamy
Subramanian Swamy is an Indian politician, economist, and statistician who serves in the Rajya Sabha, the Indian Parliament’s upper house, as a nominated Member of Parliament. He was a professor of Mathematical Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi before entering politics. His Hindu nationalist ideas are well-known.
20. Sushma Swaraj
Sushma Swaraj was a Supreme Court lawyer and an Indian politician. Swaraj, a senior member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, served as India’s Minister of External Affairs during the first Narendra Modi administration (2014–2019). After Indira Gandhi, she was the second woman to occupy the position. She was elected as a Member of Parliament seven times and as a Member of the Legislative Assembly three times. She became the youngest cabinet minister of the Indian state of Haryana at the age of 25 in 1977. She also served as Delhi’s 5th Chief Minister for a brief period in 1998, becoming the city’s first female Chief Minister.
Our country has had its fair share of tough and unbeatable Indian politicians. They shook the world in their younger days. Comment down below which one of these Indian politicians inspired you the most.