Word: bengals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that Islam and Bhashani's brand of socialism do not mix. His critics also charge that he is seizing ,on secessionist tendencies chiefly because an independent East Pakistan would be so weak that it would be susceptible to influence from China and the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal, which is now ruled by a Communist government. Bhashani, while not a Communist, is a radical leftist with close personal and political ties to Peking...
...elections were especially important because Indira's party in most cases had schemed to bring them about. After the Congress Party's initial setbacks in the 1967 state elections, the four states -West Bengal, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh-had ended up with weak, ineffectual governments, which Indira subsequently suspended, placing the states under direct President's Rule. After a period of political fence mending, Indira hoped that her party would regain its dominance in the new elections...
...Congress Party's most stunning setback came in India's most strategic state, West Bengal, which borders East Pakistan. It also contains India's largest concentration of industry and its most miserable city, Calcutta. In West Bengal, the twelve-party United Front, which is dominated by Peking-lining Communists, won 214 seats in the 280-seat legislature, while the Congress Party's holding dropped from 127 seats to only 55. There was little doubt that the United Front would now put together a government that may well be headed by a Maoist chief minister...
...sometimes pillaged, their plants. In more than 1,000 instances, the workers subjected their helpless employers to a special Bengali torture-the gherao. They kept their superiors trapped in their offices, often without recourse to sanitary facilities, until they acceded to the often unreasonable union demands. Soon West Bengal was in a dangerous state of disorder, with its industry grinding toward a standstill. Indira placed the state under New Delhi's rule...
Most Indian political experts believe that the United Front will behave somewhat better this time in order to keep the Prime Minister from reimposing President's Rule on West Bengal. That may be overly optimistic. In all likelihood, the Communist victory there and the process of political fragmentation elsewhere in India forebode a period of increasing instability and chaos...