Word: sikhs
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...charge d'affaires in New Delhi, Liviu Radu, 55, left his heavily guarded home one morning last week, climbed into his black Dacia sedan and was promptly seized by four armed men as he drove to his office. Two days later, the Khalistan Liberation Force and three other militant Sikh separatist groups in the Indian state of Punjab jointly claimed responsibility for the kidnapping...
Violence is nothing new in Punjab. So far this year, 4,200 people have been killed in clashes between the Hindu-dominated government and militant Sikhs, who have been fighting for a separate nation called Khalistan since the early 1980s. But what could Sikh rebels possibly have against the Romanians...
Well, the abduction was apparently a retaliation for the death of a Sikh extremist and the arrest of two others in the attempted assassination of Julio Ribeiro, 62, the Indian ambassador to Romania, in Bucharest two months ago. Ribeiro, who was shot while walking with his wife in a suburb of the Romanian capital, has long been a target because of his get-tough "bullet-for-bullet" policy toward Sikh separatists during his two-year tenure as police chief of Punjab. The kidnappers' current demands, however, strike much closer to home. They are seeking the release of three Sikhs...
Security was light: a scattering of police, no automatic rifles, no metal detectors in evidence, if present at all. Gandhi had been campaigning with little protection, a marked contrast to his previous style. His mother's assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984, the event that catapulted the former airline pilot into the prime ministership, had highlighted his vulnerability. For years he wore a bulletproof vest and surrounded himself with security so tight that opponents had begun ridiculing...
...consolation to supporters of the family that the deaths of both mother and son may have originated in policies of their own devising. Indira had covertly helped promote the rise of Sikh extremism in Punjab in an effort to thwart a more moderate rival party in the troubled northwestern state. In his turn, Rajiv had gone along for a while with arming the Tamil Tigers and furnishing them with sanctuary and training camps in southern India. But he had abandoned that effort by mid-1987, and the image that survives him is mostly favorable...