Word: kerala
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pledge to surrender my rice ration for the people of Kerala. I also pledge not to eat or serve rice until the food situation there is normal." That was Indira Gandhi's way of showing her sympathy last week for the plight of South India's most populous state...
Hardly had she spoken when the food problem exploded with violent rioting in desperately poor Kerala state on India's southern tip. Originally, all Kerala's political parties had agreed to call peaceful demonstrations and a one-day general strike to protest a cut in the rice ration that Shastri had ordered shortly before his death. But Communist agitators quickly began fanning the demonstrators' emotions, calling for secession from India and crying that only a bloody revolution could solve Kerala's problems. With things getting out of control, the other parties urged their followers to return...
...Prime Minister's first impulse was to fly to Kerala at once, hoping to calm the crowds as she had done in Madras during last year's language riots. But her advisers persuaded her to give up the idea as too dangerous. Instead, she ordered half the cut to be reinstated, increasing the daily rice ration to about 5 oz. per person. That seemed to satisfy most Keralians, but it could be no more than a temporary solution. Unless fresh supplies can be found, it might well be necessary to cut the ration again...
...1950s, Indira often returned from trips behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain, bubbling about the beauties of Communism, but she turned out to be a tough, uncompromising anti-Communist when she ran up against Red subversion in India. A case in point was the poverty-stricken state of Kerala in India's arid southwest. The Communists had won elections for state officers and had been in power for 27 months when Indira popped in for a visit in 1959. She was horrified. What seems to have upset her most were new schoolbooks that depicted Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, instead...
...most significant argument for Indian control of Kashmir relates to what New Delhi officials call the "fissiparous tendencies" of their country. If Kashmir could secede by holding a plebiscite, the argument runs, there would be nothing to prevent Madras or Kerala or any other state from doing the same thing. The warrior Sikhs of Punjab have long dreamed of an independent nation. In fact, a Sikh leader, Sant Fateh Singh, was scheduled last week to begin a fast that would be followed by self-immolation, to force Indian acceptance of Sikh autonomy. In deference to the war emergency, Singh...