Word: bengal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...country is to make technological progress, is the fact that 60,000 of the country's 300,000 engineers are out of work. The educated young who are unable to find jobs and have lost all faith in parliamentary government have proved easy targets for parties like West Bengal's Maoist Naxalites...
...protest, Mujib called an all-day general strike for the following day, and half-day strikes for the rest of the week, shuttering offices, shops and factories and halting trains, planes and even rickshas. Angry mobs carrying bamboo staves, the weapon Mujib prescribes, roared "Joi Bangla!" (Victory to Bengal) through Dacca's seamy streets. At least 25 died in Dacca in clashes with soldiers: another 100 were killed at the port city of Chittagong. Mujib denounced the army shooting as an "unforgivable sin" and warned: "There will be civil war if they do not withdraw...
...poverty more painfully evident than in Calcutta, a begrimed slut of a city where 200,000 people sleep in the streets at night and an unskilled worker earns a pitiful two rupees (260) a day. India's largest metropolis (pop. 7,900,000), the capital of teeming West Bengal State, is also a place where artists and intellectuals thrive. Not surprisingly, in view of the intense pressures upon them, the all-consuming passion for this gifted and volatile people is politics. Put two Bengalis in a room and inevitably there is a heated political argument...
This week, as all of India goes to the polls to elect a new Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), 18 parties in West Bengal are also contesting 280 seats in the state legislature. Political infighting has reached a murderous frenzy, especially in Calcutta. In "the packed and pestilential town," as Rudyard Kipling described it, every day is St. Valentine's Day and every side street as potentially lethal as the Chicago garage where seven gangsters were slaughtered by rival hoods in a Feb. 14, 1929, massacre. Since March of last year, when Bengal's coalition government collapsed...
...rural land holdings, but many feudal aristocrats had got around the measure by parceling out land to armies of relatives. After court attempts to untangle the land-reform problem failed. Charu Mazumdar, a member of the Marxist group, instigated a peasant revolt in the Naxalbari region of West Bengal. The leaders of Mazumdar's own party, fearful that the peasant revolt would spread, sent in armed police to put down the uprising. At least eleven women and children were killed. "After that," as a Naxalite spokesman said, "nobody could stop the movement...