Word: bihar
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Bhave has collected gifts amounting to 4,600,000 acres, but his disciples can point to only 213,000 acres actually redistributed. About half this amount has come from landlords in Bihar state, who have given Bhave large tracts of barren land, and thereby achieved a spurious odor of sanctity, while continuing to exploit tenants on their good land. Criticism of the muddled organization of Bhave's Bhoodan (land-gift) movement has steadily mounted. Cracked Bombay Governor Harekrushna Mahtab: "Gandhi wished to abolish poverty; Bhoodan merely distributes...
Congress Party leaders dutifully took these proposals home, blandly proposed the merging of Bengal and Bihar (total pop. 65 million), the merging of Bombay state with huge slices of Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad (approx. pop. 43 million), the merging of Madras with Mysore and Travancore-Cochin (approx. pop. 55 million). Gasped the opposition parties: a plot to hold power through creating a group of superstates...
Nothing could please the Communists more, and at week's end they were pressing their advantage. They paralyzed Calcutta with a strike of 2,000,000 workers to demand a bigger chunk of Bihar State for West Bengal. Across India, Sikhs rioted in Amritsar, and a Sikh leader told a cheering audience: "If Sikh demands are not met, the Bombay drama may be repeated in the Punjab...
...commission's plan (see map) is to reduce India's 29 states to 16, all of them with a full measure of local government: four northern Hindustani-speaking states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan), two southern Telegu-speaking states (Andhra, Hyderabad), one state each for eight other languages, and two bilingual states (Punjab, Bombay). New Delhi fears harsh reaction to any changes, particularly in Punjab, with its proud Sikhs. Reduced to a minority (32%) among Hindi-speakers in an enlarged Punjab, the Punjabi-speaking Sikhs may turn their resentment into violence when the map-changers...
...Gandhian ideal of satyagraha invoked the power of souls when souls were pure, but today's soul force rioting often stirred up by Communist agitators, is really only mass hooliganism. Addressing a crowd of 200,000 in Bihar, amid unprecedented booing, Nehru told students, "In Russia, I saw tremendous progress through discipline and hard work. But you want only chaos and confusion. You cannot even dream of how you would be dealt with in Russia...