Word: harijan
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...small hamlets and villages in hopes of tapping the Untouchable vote. In West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Communists have made considerable headway with promises of liberal land handouts. Indira has a trump card of her own: the exception to the image of the hopeless harijan, Food and Agriculture Minister Jag-jivan Ram, an old Gandhi and Untouchable leader who last December became Indira's party president...
Untouchables are regular victims of brutality. In remote villages, "uppity" harijan women are sometimes paraded nude through the streets and then raped. A scuffle between an Untouchable laborer and some caste Hindus in Tamil Nadu State on Christmas Day in 1968 led to an arson attack on an Untouchable ghetto: 42 men, women and children were burned alive...
Placard-carrying "militant" Untouchables have not yet appeared on the streets of Delhi, but the harijan case is being made more and more vocally by the small harijan bloc in Parliament, by a few enlightened caste Hindus-and by the Communists. As Gandhi warned, if love and legislation do not overcome Untouchability, the only alternative may be bloody revolution...
...ablest working Cabinet man. As Communications Minister in the 1950s, for example, he planned the airline reorganization that nationalized Air-India, the country's international carrier. Even more important than his ministerial work is his role, conferred by Gandhi 23 years ago, as the Congress Party's harijan leader. It provides him with a powerful fulcrum. When Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri died in 1966, Ram swung his bloc of more than 50 harijan parliamentary votes behind Indira Gandhi, assuring her election as Prime Minister over a conservative Syndicate faction rival. The Syndicate's bosses have never...