Word: fateh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Sant Fateh Singh, 61, leader of India's 8,000,000 Sikhs during their separatist movement in the '60s; of a heart attack; in Amritsar, India. As spiritual and political guru of the Sikhs, a monotheistic cult concentrated in India's Punjab region, Sant Fateh Singh used public fasts and periodic threats of self-immolation to pressure the central government to grant his people statehood within the Indian federal system...
Three years passed. Last October, an 83-year-old Sikh, protesting the division of Chandigarh, died on the 74th day of a fast. In the ensuing crisis Sikh Leader Sant Fateh Singh, who had been threatening self-immolation off and on since 1966, vowed to go through with it this time unless Chandigarh was given unconditionally to the Punjab. He set Feb. 1 as the date. As if to underline the Sant's resolve, his attendants had collected kerosene and firewood at their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. To complicate matters, a Hindu named K. K. Toofan...
...matter what Mrs. Gandhi decided to do, trouble was bound to follow. She put off a decision as long as possible. But with Sant Fateh Singh's deadline approaching, she had to make up her mind. Three days before the Sant's scheduled bonfire, she announced that Chandigarh would go to the Sikhs; in compensation, the Hindu state would be given $26 million for a new capital, and in addition would be ceded a part of the Punjab's fertile Fazilka precinct containing 114 Hindi-speaking villages...
Fair as the compromise seemed, it enraged both communities. Mobs in Haryana attacked railway stations and burned trains and buses; eight persons died in the rioting. Angry Sikhs hurled stones at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where elders of the Akali Dal Party released the fasting Sant Fateh Singh from his suicide vow. "My pledge has been fulfilled," murmured the Sant, accepting a glass of orange juice from the temple's head priest. And Chandigarh, named after Chandi, the North Indian equivalent of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, has lived up to its name...