Word: india
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...whom Mohandas Gandhi once lovingly called harijans (children of God) began to find their voices. The 85 million harijans, or Untouchables, who are the lowest in the rigid Hindu caste system, had thought for a brief moment last week that durable Jagjivan Ram, 71, the widely acknowledged leader of India's politically potent harijans, was soon to be Prime Minister. It was not to be. Their hopes were dashed by a bitter impasse in India's parliamentary system that culminated in an unprecedented constitutional crisis...
...only 15 minutes before a vote of confidence in the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, that would have sent his 24-day-old coalition government down to certain defeat. In line for the job, or so he thought, was Ram, also official leader of the opposition. But India's President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy bypassed Ram and heeded the advice of outgoing Charan Singh to dissolve the Lok Sabha and call new national elections. He appointed Charan Singh as head of a caretaker government until elections can be held in mid-December...
...Wherever you put your foot in the mud that is now Morvi, you strike a body." So said Pankaj Zaveri, a survivor of the most disastrous accident ever to befall India. In the midafternoon of a torrentially rainy Saturday, the 197-ft.-high earthen Machhu dam in western India's Gujarat state suddenly burst open. The waters behind it boiled six miles down a river in the state's Saurashtra district and crashed into Morvi, a semi-industrial town of 75,000, known as "the Paris of Saurashtra" because of its many green parks and broad avenues...
...that precipitated the collapse dumped 28 in. of rain on the region in less than 24 hours. Water was already lapping over the top of the dam when engineers rushed to try to open the sluice gates. But some of the gates stuck, for reasons still unexplained, and thus India's "Paris" was doomed...
While the campaign is supposed to run for three years, the early returns have not been especially positive. Reflecting the feeling of many Aussies, a Sydney Morning Herald columnist groaned that the "half-witted" promotion seemed "calculated to appeal to a backward rural electorate in India." Worse still, critics quickly noted that Project Australia, as it is called, has some imported features: the new pep song is borrowed from the old American folk favorite Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the promotional pens being handed out are stamped MADE IN U.S.A. So far the drive has succeeded mostly in inspiring derisive...