ABSTRACT
Vijaya Lakshmi and her husband both put up for election in the United Provinces, and the elder girls returned for their first holiday from Woodstock School to find their parents deeply involved. The elections produced a Congress majority in seven out of the eleven provinces of India. Both the Pandits were returned, and Vijaya Lakshmi announced her victory to her daughters in a telegram: ‘Yes for Mummie.’ The following summer she was elected unopposed as Minister of Local Self-Government and Public Health for the United Provinces, where the Premier was Pandit Govind Vallabh Pant. The United Provinces was the first province to place this Bill on the Statute Book, and all the present village reforms in India arise from it. This concern for her working environment was to accompany Vijaya Lakshmi throughout her life. As Governor of Maharashtra in 1963, she decided to change the enormous official desk in the Raj Bhawan in Bombay.
