Word: prakasam
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Dates: during 1947-1947
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...Tanguthurai Prakasam, the Prime Minister of India's sprawling, southern province of Madras, has some strange ideas. He would, for example, like to scrap Madras' big textile industry in favor of Mohandas Gandhi's cottage spinners. But not even Prakasam's bitterest opponents have ever challenged his integrity, or his reputation for truthfulness. Last week the 75-year-old premier had a big budget of shocking truth for the Presidency's Legislative Assembly. To Indians still accustomed to think only in terms of Hindu v. Moslem conflicts, Prakasam revealed that Madras had weathered a full...
...Prakasam said that his government had arrested 500 Red leaders because they had initiated a provincewide "reign of terror and pain." He cited chapter and verse to back this up. The Communists had seized lands, looted crops, attacked government buildings, murdered landlords and servants, burned rice trains...
...police in jungle areas and even dug trenches for battles fought with sticks and spears. In Tanjore, the densely populated, highly irrigated "garden of southern India," they scorched the fertile earth into a desert. Mobs of several thousand laborers drove away landlords and took possession of all available land. Prakasam said the Communists had an espionage system throughout the Madras Secretariat, and regularly published confidential government correspondence...
When the Red leaders, encouraged by these widespread successes, intimated that a general strike was in the offing, Prakasam sought the counsel of Congress Party Boss Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel's advice was strong action. Prakasam followed it -not, as he said, "for the mere purpose of satisfying our own will or acting the tyrant. . . . It has become an absolute necessity...
Patel himself had been less patient than Prakasam. He had struck at Communist publicists elsewhere in India without waiting for open revolt (TIME, Jan. 27). However, many Red leaders, including Party Boss Puran Chandra Joshi, were still at large, and the Communists were still a menacing factor in the political life of India. Before the war their influence had been negligible...