Word: assam
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...quarrel dates back to 1947, when the Nagas expected to get their independence at the same time as India. Instead, the 370,000 Nagas were incorporated into the Indian state of Assam. Fighting began in 1952, when the Assam Rifles tried to enforce Indian rule. Under the British raj, the Nagas were left more or less alone. Their chief contact with the outside world came through U.S. and British Baptist missionaries, who built schools and clinics and tried to put clothes on the Naga, which in Sanskrit means "naked." A vigorous and intelligent people, thought to be distantly related...
...Shastri may seem provincial, since he has only once been beyond India's borders, and then only to neighboring Nepal. In a nation so divided by religion, language and regionalism, his great strength is his ability to bring people together. When a volatile language dispute broke out in Assam, Lal Bahadur quietly worked out a settlement. When the Sikhs campaigned for a separate state, Shastri was able to talk the Sikh leader out of a planned fast unto death. "I listen to different viewpoints. I have the capacity to understand them. I keep an open mind." As Home Minister...
Each government tried to make propaganda capital out of the perfidy of the other. Hastily assembling a delegation of foreign correspondents, India raced them to relief camps in Assam, where 50,000 Hindus and Christians had fled to escape Moslem persecution, arson, and murder. It was not easy to assess the accuracy of all the atrocity stories being handed the press. One group said that it had been machine-gunned by Pakistani border guards as it tried to cross the frontier; the original claim of 200 refugees killed in the slaughter was later downgraded to two. The Pakistanis could retort...
...some leading Indian military men is that the Reds want eventually to drive as far as Calcutta, thereby outflanking all of Southeast Asia. In such a drive, the Chinese would be able to take advantage of anti-Indian feeling along the way, notably among the rebellious Nagas in East Assam, and in the border state of Sikkim. Reaching Calcutta, perhaps the world's most miserable city, where 125,000 homeless persons sleep on the streets each night, they would find readymade the strongest Communist organization in India. According to this theory, the Reds could set up a satellite regime...
Viewed from Peking, the difficulties of supply through the Himalayas in dead of winter might make the Communists hesitate to try to occupy Assam, especially since India's determined show of national unity, and the West's evident willingness to support India to the hilt. There is a significant indication of one Chinese anxiety in the cease-fire offer. After warning that renewed war will "bring endless disaster to India," Peking says: "Particularly serious is the prospect that if U.S. imperialism is allowed to become involved, the present conflict will grow into a war in which Asians...