Word: taras
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...string cot in the courtyard of the Golden Temple of Amritsar lay Master Tara Singh, 76, political leader of India's 6,000,000 Sikhs. Masterji, as he is called by his followers in the Punjab, was entering the second month of a fast he had sworn to keep unto death, or until the Indian government grants his demand for a Punjabi Suba-a separate, Sikh-dominated state. Few fasts since the days of Mahatma Gandhi's Empire-baiting hunger strikes had caused such a stir in India...
Though criticized by many for "debasing" the almost sacred ritual of the soulcleansing fast as practiced by the Mahatma, Tara Singh knows what he wants: he hopes to force Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to partition about two-thirds of the Punjab's 47,456 square miles into an acU ministrative area independent of Hindu domination. The Punjabi-speaking Sikhs, whose monotheistic religion is an offshoot of the Hindu but without its caste system and swarms of gods and demigods, are the only one of India's 14 major linguistic groups without a separate state...
Last May the Indian government arrested the Sikhs' wily political leader, Master Tara Singh, for advocating a Sikh march on New Delhi to demand statehood. Before disappearing behind prison walls, Tara Singh designated Sant Fateh Singh as his successor. For weeks stretching into months, young Sikhs, shouting "Punjabi Suba Zindabad" (Long live Punjabi state), had poured out of the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the Sikh temple at New Delhi-into the waiting arms of tough Indian police, who hustled them off to prison. At one time India's overburdened detention camps held 20,000 Sikhs. Ketones & Communiqu...
...Pradesh, the fast-and the whole Sikh effort-presented a number of galling ironies. In the first place, fasting as a political weapon was developed by Nehru's nationalist mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, but is now regarded by New Delhi as in bad taste. Secondly, to justify keeping Master Tara Singh in jail without proof of crime, Nehru a month ago had to insist on a further extension of the same Preventive-Detention Act passed originally under British rule to allow the imprisonment of Gandhi, Nehru himself and other Indian freedom fighters. After the bill was rammed through...