Word: raj
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Dhoti Democracy. For 77 years, the Congress Party has been the most influential Indian political organization, today controls 373 seats in the Lok Sabha. In the years of the British raj, Congress kindled the fires of independence, gathered under its banners peasants, landowners, untouchables, maharajahs, Communists, capitalists, liberals and reactionaries. Only the massive national appeal of Mahatma Gandhi and the united determination to oust Britain from India kept the catchall party together. But the Congress became so ingrained in the Indian consciousness that the party did not fall apart after independence came in 1947. The various elements that made...
Died. His Highness Maharajadhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Sawai Shri Yeshwant Rao ("Junior") Holkar Bahadur, Maharaja of Indore, 53, progressive-minded, Oxford-educated ruler of 1,500,000 worshipful subjects from 1926 until his pensioning-off by the Indian government in 1948; of cancer; in New Delhi. Of low caste despite his princely rank (he was descended from a land-grabbing shepherd), the Maharaja devoted large chunks of an estimated prewar income of $70 million a year to the delights of shikar (hunting), zenana (the harem), and the support of the two American wives whom he divorced in Reno, but sponsored enough...
Died. Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, first Baron of Peaslake, 89, longtime wheelhorse of Britain's Labor Party, who, as Secretary of State for India, played a major role in the negotiations that ended the British raj; in London. A well-heeled, cause-addicted Etonian, Lord Pethick-Lawrence first won the public eye by adopting both his wife's name (Pethick) and her cause (female suffrage), went to jail and technically bankrupt as a result, scored his most memorable political victory in 1923 when he became M.P. for West Leicester by defeating the Liberal candidate, Winston Churchill...
Lady Diana has a curious way of making real people seem like Waugh characters,* as she does in the cinematic glimpse of life in the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, where the "brontosaurian" viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, maintained a dur-barlike protocol in the last days of the British raj. The edge was taken off the formality by the sight of His Excellency sidling about the vast building clutching his "catty" (catapult) for shooting crows on the rooftop...
...strengthening his own authority without bruising any feelings, he announced a reorganization of the U.A.R. government. The first result was to move Hourani as a member of the new central Cabinet out of Syria and into Egypt. A second was to clip the scheming Colonel Abdel Hamid Ser-raj's power as proconsul in Syria by placing him under the Egyptian Minister of Interior, who would take over Serraj's much-prized authority to appoint Syrian provincial governors. That took care of the two most ambitious power seekers in Damascus. In the shuffle Nasser also dropped his second...