Word: sikhs
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...contested seats in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament, while winning more than 50% of the popular vote for the first time in history. Just two months after he was propelled into power by his mother's assassination at the hands of two Sikh bodyguards, and less than four years after he entered politics as Amethi's Member of Parliament, Gandhi had won decisive control of the world's largest democracy...
Religious hatred of another sort claimed Indira Gandhi, who was gunned down by two of her own Sikh guards in her tamarind-scented garden on a sunny October morn. She had just bid her guards "Namaste," the gracious Indian salutation accompanied by the crossing of hands before the face. Assassination may be the most invidious of terrorist acts, since the consequences can ricochet disastrously through a country and beyond. Mrs. Gandhi's death produced such a tragedy: some 2,000 Indians perished in the flames of sectarian violence that followed...
...committed by members of her bodyguard whom she had continued to trust against all warnings. The so-called disciples of India's revered Guru Nanak, contemptuously basking in foreign shelter in Western countries, have no reason for jubilation. I feel sad about the shame brought upon my Sikh countrymen by those traitors. They emptied their guns into someone who, with all her real or imagined power, was a small, frail old woman...
Contrary to extremist sentiment, most Sikhs realize the importance of their economic and cultural linkages with the rest of the nation. The most vocal and tenacious of Sikhs who are clamoring for separatism are actually those not in India at all; these are Sikh expatriates, living mainly in the U.S., Canada, and Britain, who are far removed from the crippling consequences of actual partition...
...young Sikh men start to rid themselves of the traditionally visible traits of their culture--uncut hair wrapped in turbans, unshaven beards, etc.--some of the older, more conservative Sikhs have expressed alarm at the threat to Sikh identity. It is this impulse that lends support to Sikh separatists, no matter how extreme. But the moderates must lead the way into coming to terms with a changing society. The Sikh community must define for themselves what constitutes being a Sikh in the here and now and not in some romanticized and dangerous notion of seventeeth-century Sikh soldier-saints...