Word: bengal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Snaking down from a Himalayan ice cave to the Bay of Bengal, the 1,560-mile- long river is called Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges), the holiest of all Hindu streams. Every pious Hindu wishes to be cremated on the Ganges' banks and to bequeath his ashes to her waters...
...more unhappy news that reached him the same day. In two of three state elections, his Congress (I) Party had suffered major setbacks at the hands of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the strongest of the country's several Communist parties. The defeats in the states of West Bengal and Kerala seemed to highlight a growing disenchantment not only with the Congress Party but with the once highly popular Prime Minister...
...Kashmir offered little consolation. In the past 18 months the Congress Party has lost state elections in Punjab, Assam and Mizoram. Gandhi appeared willing to live with these defeats because they temporarily quieted rebellious local ethnic and religious parties. There were, however, no such considerations in Kerala and West Bengal. Even more devastating, the loss of Kerala marked the first time Gandhi's party was out of power in all four south Indian states...
...modernize the economy and clean up the Congress Party, whose members he said in 1985 "follow no principle of public morality." Today, none of those goals has been fulfilled, and Gandhi seems to have lost his golden electioneering touch. He made four campaign swings in March through West Bengal (pop. 60 million). Referring to the Communist government of West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, 72, Gandhi repeatedly exhorted the crowds to "smash the red fort of Marxism...
...years of relatively good government under their rule. The Communists have distributed tracts of farmland to landless peasants and kept government corruption in check. The party, which broke with Moscow in 1964, is hardly doctrinaire. Chief Minister Basu, for example, is coaxing multinational companies to invest in West Bengal...