Word: kerala
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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...
...words were admirable enough, but they would not fill bellies, as rioting students made vocally clear. Through out Kerala, gangs attacked government offices, blockaded roads, cut telephone wires, overturned buses, and fought with police. At several places students even ripped up rails and crossties, thus delaying the trains that were carrying emergency food to the 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...