Word: uttar
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Nearly 65 million voters went to the polls last week to elect new legislatures in five of India's states. The key election was in Uttar Pradesh, whose 425-member state legislature is the largest in the nation. Uttar Pradesh - meaning northern plain - has the biggest population (more than 95 million) of any of the 21 states and the largest delegation (85 of the 524 members) in the lower house of the national Parliament. It also happens to be the home state of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, as it was for India's two previous Prime Ministers. Thus...
...national parliamentary elections, Mrs. Gandhi was at the peak of her popularity, and she and the Congress Party won overwhelmingly in Uttar Pradesh. Though she is still respected there, the state government has been shoddy and corrupt and as feudalistic as the ancient Moslem regimes that were displaced by the British. Indeed, in the past year the state has been beset by a provincial-police mutiny, widespread rioting and looting prompted by food shortages, soaring inflation, power failures, unemployment, vicious black markets and bureaucratic incompetence. As a result, Mrs. Gandhi was reluctantly forced to fire her hand-picked state government...
Inflation is rampant. Retail prices have soared 24% in twelve months. In Uttar Pradesh state, 20,000 policemen struck in May for better wages and conditions, leading to an ugly and bloody clash with the army in which 34 men were killed. Government officials from the highest to the lowest local levels have become unashamedly corrupt. It now takes a bribe to get a child into school, to get a milk card, even to get a long-distance railway ticket, let alone any of the innumerable licenses that India's pullulating bureaucracy demands. One capital resident said last week...
...Gandhi fears that if the Andhras are allowed to have their own separate state, it will open a Pandora's box of similar demands in other states plagued by economic disparities. Already, factions in her home state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, have made known their intention to seek realignment along economic lines. On the other hand, dividing Andhra Pradesh into two states may be the most equitable solution, since the Telanganans are as eager to have a separate state of their own as the Andhras...
...clad only in tattered rags. Last week, in the largest land grab in India's recent history, peasants by the hundreds of thousands marched out in ten of the nation's 17 states and seized land held by rich landlords and the government. From Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the north to Maharashtra and Gujarat on the west coast, they claim to have seized a total of 32,000 acres, at least temporarily...