Prime Ministers of India

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India and a central figure in Indian politics before and after independence. He emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian independence movement under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi and ruled India from its establishment as an independent nation in 1947 until his death in 1964. He is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state: a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic. He was also known as Pandit Nehru due to his roots with the Kashmiri Pandit community while many Indian children knew him as Chacha Nehru

Lal Bahadur Shastri was the 2nd Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party. Shastri joined the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. Deeply impressed and influenced by Mahatma Gandhi (with whom he shared his birthday), he became a loyal follower, first of Gandhi, and then of Jawaharlal Nehru. Following independence in 1947, he joined the latter's government and became one of Prime Minister Nehru's principal, first as Railways Minister (1951–56), and then in a variety of other functions, including Home Minister.

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi was an Indian politician and central figure of the Indian National Congress party. She was the first and to date the only female Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi belonged to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and was the daughter of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Despite her surname Gandhi, she is not related to the family of Mahatma Gandhi. She served as Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, making her the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of India after her father.

Morarji Desai was an Indian independence activist and served between 1977 to 1979 as the 4th Prime Minister of India for the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as: Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India. On the international scene, Desai holds international fame for his peace activism and made efforts to initiate peace between two rival South Asian states, Pakistan and India.

Chaudhary Charan Singh was the Prime Minister of the Republic of India, serving from 28 July 1979 until 14 January 1980. Historians and people alike frequently refer to him as the 'champion of India's peasants. Charan Singh was born in a Jat family in 1902 in village Bhadola of Ghaziabad District in Uttar Pradesh Charan Singh entered politics as part of the Independence Movement motivated by Mohandas Gandhi. He was active from 1931 in the Ghaziabad District Arya Samaj as well as the Meerut District Indian National Congress for which he was jailed twice by the British. Before independence, as a member of Legislative Assembly of the United Provinces elected in 1937, he took a deep interest in the laws that were detrimental to the village economy and he slowly built his ideological and practical stand against the exploitation of tillers of the land by landlords.

Rajiv Ratna Gandhi was the 6th Prime Minister of India, serving from 1984 to 1989. He took office after the 1984 assassination of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to become the youngest Indian Prime Minister at the age of 40. Gandhi was a scion of the politically powerful Nehru–Gandhi family, which had been associated with the Indian National Congressparty. For much of his childhood, his maternal grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister.

Vishwanath Pratap Singh was an Indian politician and government official, the 7th Prime Minister of India from 1989 to 1990. Singh is known for trying to improve the lot of India's lower castes as a Prime Minister.

Chandra Shekhar Singh was an Indian politician who, for a short period of time, served as the 8th Prime Minister of India, between 10 November 1990 and 21 June.

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the 9th Prime Minister of India, from 1991–1996. His ascendancy to the prime ministership was politically significant in that he was the first holder of this office from a non-Hindi-speaking region, belonging to the southern part of India. He led an important administration, overseeing a major economic transformation and several home incidents affecting national security of India.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee is an Indian politician who was the 10th Prime Minister of India, first for 13 days in 1996 and then from 1998 to 2004. A leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he is the first Prime Minister from outside the Indian National Congress party to serve a full five-year term. At age 92, Vajpayee is currently the oldest living former India Prime Minister.

Inder Kumar Gujral was an Indian politician who served as the Prime Minister of India from April 1997 to March 1998. Gujral was the third PM to be from the Rajya Sabha, the first being Indira Gandhi and the second H. D. Deve Gowda.

Inder Kumar Gujral was an Indian politician who served as the Prime Minister of India from April 1997 to March 1998. Gujral was the third PM to be from the Rajya Sabha, the first being Indira Gandhi and the second H. D. Deve Gowda.

Manmohan Singh is an Indian economist and politician who served as the Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014. The first Sikh in office, Singh was also the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term. Born in Gah (now in Punjab, Pakistan), Singh's family migrated to India during its partition in 1947. After obtaining his doctorate in economics from Oxford, Singh worked for the United Nations during 1966–69. He subsequently began his bureaucratic career when Lalit Narayan Mishra hired him as an advisor in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Over the 70s and 80s, Singh held several key posts in the Government of India, such as Chief Economic Advisor (1972–76), Reserve Bank governor (1982–85) and Planning Commission head.

Narendra Damodardas Modi is an Indian politician who is the 14th and current Prime Minister of India, in office since May 2014. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, and is the Member of Parliament for Varanasi. Modi, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is a Hindu nationalist and member of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).