Word: rajiv
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...Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi emerged from the President's House in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo last week, he had reason to smile. The previous day the Prime Minister had signed an agreement with Sri Lankan President Junius R. Jayewardene that promised to end a brutal civil war. But as Gandhi passed the white-uniformed men of a Sri Lankan naval honor guard, one of the sailors broke ranks and swung at Gandhi with the butt of his rifle. The Prime Minister caught a glancing blow in the back and stumbled. Guards quickly hustled Gandhi away and hauled...
...turned out, Rajiv Gandhi was not injured. Nonetheless, the attack was a painful reminder to the Prime Minister of how much strife and distrust had been aroused by the pact he had just initialed -- and how uncertain were its chances of success. For four years Sri Lanka, a teardrop of an island off India's southern coast, has been plagued by a vicious battle that has claimed more than 6,000 lives. Pitting the Sinhalese majority against the minority Tamils, the conflict has not only imperiled Jayewardene's government but threatened to drag New Delhi further into a war that...
...slight injury that Rajiv Gandhi suffered when he was attacked by a Sri Lankan honor guardsman last week is not the only insult the Indian Prime Minister has endured lately. Just two years ago Gandhi, 42, was hailed as the most promising of leaders, an enlightened Prime Minister whose reputation for probity won him the nickname "Mr. Clean." Today, battered by corruption scandals, local-election defeats, the defection of ministers and worsening communal violence, Gandhi, 42, is widely regarded as pathetically inept. As the newsmagazine India Today put it, "Rajiv Gandhi is not just in crisis. He is the crisis...
Suddenly, in an unambiguous show of support for the rebels, the Indian government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, which up until then had been trying to mediate the civil war, dispatched 19 fishing boats laden with food and medical supplies across the Palk Strait to the battle zone. Condemning the shipment as interference in its internal affairs, Sri Lanka sent naval vessels to interdict the convoy, which was turned back after a tense confrontation in mid-strait...
...India, though he will surely try to avoid provoking a military response that would topple him from power. He also faces the problem of preventing Sinhalese anger from erupting into bloody race riots, such as those in which an estimated 1,000 Tamils were massacred in 1983. "Rajiv Gandhi may have acted out of domestic compulsion," said a Sri Lankan official, "but he doesn't seem to realize that he has taken this country to the brink of disaster...