Word: sabha
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This week, as all of India goes to the polls to elect a new Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), 18 parties in West Bengal are also contesting 280 seats in the state legislature. Political infighting has reached a murderous frenzy, especially in Calcutta. In "the packed and pestilential town," as Rudyard Kipling described it, every day is St. Valentine's Day and every side street as potentially lethal as the Chicago garage where seven gangsters were slaughtered by rival hoods in a Feb. 14, 1929, massacre. Since March of last year, when Bengal's coalition government collapsed...
...teeming India, everything happens in superlatives, including elections. Next week some 270 million people, the largest free electorate in the world, will be eligible to vote as the nation chooses a new, 515-seat Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament. The voting will continue for ten days, and in one state alone (Kerala), 60,000 people will be needed to count ballots...
...ruling Congress Party in order to break the hammer lock of the "Syndicate," the aging, slow-moving bosses who ran the party. The fight cost Indira 65 parliamentary votes and reduced the strength of her wing of the party to 228 seats out of 523 in the Lok Sabha, the lower house. As a result, she was forced to rely on the support of three other small parties, including two branches of the Indian Communist Party...
...last weekend, she may well introduce at the next session new legislation designed to circumvent the judges' objections. Such a bill might easily pass next time, since it initially failed by a scant one-third of a vote to get the required two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, Parliament's upper house. There are even rumors that she may dissolve Parliament and call for new elections, using the ruling on the princes as a rallying point to gain a larger majority. In a land where the average annual income is only $70, the princely privileges might well...
...Minister Y. B. Chavan, put the entire blame on the Syndicate for splitting the party, and Food Minister Jagjivan Ram exhorted Indira's supporters to keep up their attendance at the Parliament. Though the party split leaves Indira some 40 seats short of a majority in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), she intends to try to remain in power. For the time being, at least, she seems assured of sufficient support. She commands the backing of the 25 members of the Dravidian Advancement Party, a regional grouping that seeks south Indian independence. She also has the support...