Indira Gandhi, India
She was the nation's daughter, brought up under the close watch of both her father, who was India's first Prime Minister after decades of British rule, and her country. The TIME magazine cover not long after her election in January 1966 read, "Troubled India in a Woman's Hands." Those hands led India for much of the next two decades, through recession, famine, the detonation of the nation's first atomic bomb and a civil war in neighboring Pakistan that, under her guidance, saw the creation of a new state, Bangladesh.

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