Word: rams
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...hopes of tapping the Untouchable vote. In West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Communists have made considerable headway with promises of liberal land handouts. Indira has a trump card of her own: the exception to the image of the hopeless harijan, Food and Agriculture Minister Jag-jivan Ram, an old Gandhi and Untouchable leader who last December became Indira's party president...
...IAGJIVAN RAM has a lumpy, 5-ft. 5-in. frame, thick features and ears that fairly bristle with hair. He is an Untouchable, with roots in the lowly chamar (leatherworkers) caste. Yet, as Congress Party president, Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Indira Gandhi's chief ally, Ram at 61 is one of India's most powerful politicians. He is also one of the very few harijans ever to rise above the ceilings dictated by the caste system...
...Ram had several advantages. His father, though an outcaste farmer, owned a spread of 40 or 50 acres in a relatively tolerant area of Bihar state. Not until he went to Banaras Hindu University in 1926 did Ram really learn the anguish of Untouchability. When word of his outcaste status got around, his landlord threatened to lock him out. As Ram recalls it today: "I told him that if he broke my lock, I would break his head...
With a degree in science, Ram joined Gandhi's anti-British Congress movement, and wound up in jail as an agitator in the early 1940s. At independence in 1947, Ram was Congress' Minister of Labor-the first of a series of Cabinet positions he has held, with one 28-month hiatus, ever since...
Though he now spends more in a week on his State Express cigarettes than he did for a month's room and board at college, Ram is a plain-living man. A teetotaler, he counts as his greatest private pleasures a game of bridge and a few hours tending his carnations and roses...