Word: gandhis
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DIED. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, 53, black South African leader whose determined advocacy of black rights kept him in prison or under government restriction for the past 18 years; of lung cancer; in Kimberley, South Africa. A follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, Sobukwe founded the Pan-African Congress as a splinter group from the African National Congress in 1959. Following his participation in 1960 demonstrations against the restrictive pass laws that control the lives of South African blacks, Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in jail for "incitement to riot." When his term ended, Parliament...
India's reputation as "the world's largest democracy" perished abruptly on June 26, 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the imperious daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, imposed a "state of emergency," curtailed civil liberties and imprisoned tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of her political opponents. But if Indian democracy had been destroyed in a single night, it was miraculously reborn only 21 months later when Mrs. Gandhi and her Congress Party were overwhelmingly defeated at the polls...
...Mehta has observed, "anything would be better than the dictatorship of the emergency," it does not follow that India's problems have been solved with the election of Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi's family-planning program was often harshly applied. But the sterilizations (8 million in her last year of power) were a human effort to deal with crushing statistics: India's population (now over 620 million) will reach 1 billion by the year 2000. During Desai's first nine months in office, on the other hand, there were only 636,000 sterilizations...
...wrote for The New Yorker, Ved Mehta traces the corrosive effect of unchallenged political power during what he calls an "Orwellian passage of time." Mehta, who was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for many years, recognized from the beginning how dangerous a path Mrs. Gandhi had chosen. By her action, he wrote, "she risked making it possible for politicians, much more ruthless and power-hungry than she, one day to dislodge her and perpetrate abuses of power previously unimagined...
...Soviets have had their share of intelligence failures. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the KGB failed to detect Israeli preparations for crossing the Suez Canal, and underestimated the maneuver's importance once it was under way. In New Delhi, the resident KGB team concluded that Indira Gandhi would easily win re-election in 1977. More embarrassing was the gambit of Vladimir Rybachenko, who served in Paris as a UNESCO official. Shortly before Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Paris on a good-will visit in 1976, Rybachenko was caught receiving secret documents that described a French Defense...