Word: calcuttas
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Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had just finished addressing a mass rally in Calcutta when she received the news, immediately boarded her Tupolev twin-jet for the two-hour flight to New Delhi. At Delhi's airport, where her two sons and a small cluster of ministers were on hand to greet her, she quickly got into a car and was driven without lights to her office in Parliament House. Shortly after midnight the Prime Minister, speaking first in English and then Hindi, addressed the nation...
...delay in India's response, Lall joked that there had been some difficulty in getting the air force to move. It did appear that India was taken by surprise: nearly every senior cabinet official was out of the capital at the time, including Mrs. Gandhi, who was in Calcutta. During the night, Pakistani planes repeatedly attacked twelve Indian airfields. On the ground, Pakistan launched attacks along the western border...
...ruthless repression that by one estimate has claimed a million lives and has sent nearly 10 million refugees flooding into India, most of them into the state of West Bengal. Awami League leaders who escaped to India promptly set up the Bangla Desh government in exile with headquarters in Calcutta, and some 130 Bengali diplomats subsequently defected from Pakistani missions around the world. The rebels immediately began raising and training a guerrilla force that, by some estimates, now numbers...
...computers to nuclear reactors and jet aircraft. But the distance it has come is only measurable by the distance left to go. Some 200 million people still subsist on 150 a day; more than half of the 10 million government workers earn less than $25 a month. As a Calcutta industrialist put it: "The refugees have descended on our hopes like a swarm of locusts on a good crop...
...killing as many as 500,000. Last week the ghastly business of counting bodies along the bay's palm-fringed coastline was under way again. A storm with shrieking 120-m.p.h. winds, torrential rains and a 15-ft. tidal wave struck India's Orissa State, southwest of Calcutta. The death toll was set officially at 12,000, though unofficial estimates indicated that it could be closer to 25,000. Fully 1,000,000 were left homeless. Many of the victims were refugees who had poured out of East Pakistan to escape the man-made violence there...