Word: indira
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...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 chanted slogans blaming the CIA and called for an attack on the U.S. embassy. Others randomly pointed to V.P. Singh...
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...
...promising republic and shaped a sense of common purpose among a kaleidoscopic variety of / 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...
...made over the party in her own image, the willful Sanjay was groomed as her logical successor. Wielding power outside of office and the constitution, Sanjay and his Youth Congress loyalists undertook to bend the nation to their fancies, even compelling some sterilizations in the dictatorial years of Indira's 1975-77 Emergency. Sanjay proceeded to kill himself as he had lived -- recklessly, in the 1980 crash of an aerobatic plane he was flying. It was then that the self-effacing Rajiv, a pilot with domestic Indian Airlines, was recruited to be his mother's next in line...
...consolation to supporters of the family that the deaths of both mother and son may have originated in policies of their own devising. Indira had covertly helped promote the rise of Sikh extremism in Punjab in an effort to thwart a more moderate rival party in the troubled northwestern state. In his turn, Rajiv had gone along for a while with arming the Tamil Tigers and furnishing them with sanctuary and training camps in southern India. But he had abandoned that effort by mid-1987, and the image that survives him is mostly favorable...