Word: bengals
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...hope of a settlement." He urged that East and West Pakistan adopt separate constitutions, and that his followers refuse to pay taxes to the central government, which is situated in the West. He seemed on the brink of an outright declaration of independence for what he calls Bangla Desh (Bengal State), which would become the world's eighth most populous nation. If Mujib should make such an announcement, open warfare might well erupt between the East Pakistanis and the estimated 60,000 army troops, mostly Westerners, in their midst...
...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...
Urban Terrorism. The government will probably decide to hold state elections in West Bengal to coincide with the national elections. The turbulent state has been administered directly from New Delhi since its Communist-led government resigned last March. Throughout West Bengal, and especially in its capital city, Calcutta, Naxalite terrorism is on the rise (TIME, Aug. 24), and so is the resultant police repression. The Naxalite movement, so named because it originated four years ago in the remote Naxalbari region near the Himalayas, has spread to several parts of India but is now concentrated among the embittered students and unemployed...