Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That was when the driver of an overheating four-wheel drive stopped to request some water. The supplicant was Rajiv Gandhi, son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and soon to be India's leader himself. "Rajiv Gandhi was like a ray of hope for India," says Singh. "We found that we were on the same wavelength very quickly." He was later repaid for his water when Gandhi pushed the Haryana government to ease the commercial-development restrictions. Their two-hour conversation that day, says Singh, was "the birth of the entire urban-development policy of India today...
...power when the British left calls for some historical perspective. At the advent of British rule, the Mughal empire was in decline, and most of the subcontinent was under the sway of the Hindu Maratha empire. After World War II, the Indian independence movement was led by Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, and supported by people of all races and creeds. When independence was finally achieved, the new nation's founding fathers were predominantly Hindu. To their great credit, they made India's constitution a secular one. This allowed people of any race or creed, including Muslims, to call India their...
...mansion, writers, intellectuals and other well-to-do Calcuttans watched footage on video screens displaying the traumatic communal violence that wracked the city when Britain partitioned India into the separate Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority states of India and Pakistan. The unmistakable figure of a frail, cotton-clad Mahatma Gandhi appeared throughout the video. India's founding father bitterly opposed partition, declaring famously, "Let it not be said that Gandhi was party to India's vivisection. Let posterity know what agony this old soul went through thinking of it." Gandhi had stayed in Calcutta sixty years ago when India...
...Presiding over the ceremony is Gandhi's grandson, the current Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi. And following the presentation, in an act of commemoration, he set off in a convoy to Beliaghata, a poor Muslim locality in the outskirts of the city. This was where his grandfather, at the height of tensions in 1947, had moved into accommodations far more humble than the Viceroy's Palace. Hindu refugees fleeing death and persecution in East Bengal (soon to be made into East Pakistan and later independent Bangladesh) besieged Muslim areas like Beliaghata seeking revenge for their sufferings. Gandhi sought to deter further killings...
...Wednesday, hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary Calcuttans flocked around the Governor's convoy as it approached the recently refurbished house where Gandhi had starved and saved Calcutta in 1947. They filled its courtyard and crammed the gully lanes winding along its sides that had once been overrun by those angry mobs. Far from the dignified solemnity of the old Viceroy's Palace, dozens chattered and applauded when the Governor laid flower petals at an altar to Gandhi. Crowds of enthusiastic well-wishers turned his polite withdrawal into a prolonged retreat...