Word: harijans
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...that it will do much good for the country's 128 million other untouchables, or Harijans. Kuchchi's case only underscores how, despite special laws aimed at protecting them, the Harijans face despicably high levels of oppression. Last week a Harijan woman was reportedly burned to death after being gang raped by three men, again in Fatehpur. In 1989 more than 14,000 anti-Harijan atrocities, including 759 rapes and 479 murders, were registered. Countless others went unrecorded because victims fear the police, who are themselves frequently the perpetrators. Often cruelties against Harijans are considered just part of local custom...
...really trained to succeed her powerful parent, any more than Rajiv was. But in time she became a world figure who could still communicate with her people. One journalist who accompanied her on a trip a few years ago remembers how Mrs. Gandhi, when she visited a group of Harijan (untouchable) women who had been raped by men of a higher caste, sat down on the ground and listened to their stories. But she could be caustic and ruthless in dealing with party politicians. She once declared, "Some people say my father was like the banyan tree, that nothing could...
...Bengal, the parson of Christ Church flung open the church doors and called his flock from their thatched houses. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden," he intoned in a deep bass, "and I will give you rest." About 125 villagers, most of them harijan (untouchable) converts, took shelter. When winds ranging up to 100 m.p.h. ripped off the roof, the walls crumbled and entombed the congregation; all were found dead the next day. Rosaiah, the village agnostic who lost his wife and two children, had not gone to the church. "It was God that failed...
...Bombay, India, Doctoral Student Raja Dhale was distressed by the continued oppression of the harijan, or untouchable caste, to which he belonged. After reading about the Black Panthers in TIME, he founded the Dalit (Oppressed) Panthers, a group composed almost entirely of members of the untouchable caste who have since attracted considerable attention by protesting the iniquities of Indian society in polemics and poetry that have come to be known as "Dalit literature...
...ablest working Cabinet man. As Communications Minister in the 1950s, for example, he planned the airline reorganization that nationalized Air-India, the country's international carrier. Even more important than his ministerial work is his role, conferred by Gandhi 23 years ago, as the Congress Party's harijan leader. It provides him with a powerful fulcrum. When Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri died in 1966, Ram swung his bloc of more than 50 harijan parliamentary votes behind Indira Gandhi, assuring her election as Prime Minister over a conservative Syndicate faction rival. The Syndicate's bosses have never...