Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...atrocity's immediate aftermath, Gandhi supporters on streets across , India wanted to strike back but lacked clear-cut targets for their fury. As the news reached the capital that night, roving groups of young men with stubbly faces and mean looks converged on No. 10 Janpath, Gandhi's home in the heart of New Delhi. They were a rough, ill-clad bunch, much the sort that had gone berserk after Indira's murder and slaughtered thousands of Sikhs around the capital. Their mood worsened as the night wore on, and they beat up several cameramen for no apparent reason. Some...
Later Sonia Gandhi, 44, and her 19-year-old daughter Priyanka quietly escaped from the residence and flew to Madras on an Indian air force plane to claim Rajiv's body. The rest of India was in shock. By government order, shops and offices remained closed, and security forces patrolled the capital. A crucial decision came when elections commissioner T.N. Seshan put off the second and third main rounds of voting for a month. Election-related mayhem had taken 229 lives across the country even before Gandhi's assassination; in its wake, 26 more people died. A week of national...
...Gandhi had spent most of his boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit...
...religions, complexions, castes and tongues. But if the party had once relied on secularism and consensus building, in more recent years it became the fief of one family. Devoted to her country as she was, Indira cultivated the idea that India would come apart at the seams if a Gandhi did not clutch the threads...
Rajiv's greatest liability -- the fact that he was not by nature a politician -- was also his virtue. "Those who talked to Rajiv Gandhi noted the absence of humbug that is so typical of our political leaders," wrote Datta-Ray. Yet many thoughtful Indians and foreign leaders are not at all ready to write off the world's largest democracy. "Indian democracy has weathered such blows before and can do so again," said a senior British diplomat. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to New Delhi during the Kennedy Administration, called the system "imperfect but secure." Said Galbraith: "The idea...