Word: mahasabha
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...Communists, numerically weak and partially outlawed, are now promoting underground terror and sabotage, agitating even in the jails where Nehru and his Congress comrades once languished. On the far right loom the Hindu chauvinists, the Hindu Mahasabha. Beside them, noisier, more militant and dangerous, are the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-literally, Organization for Service of the Nation). They spawned Gandhi's assassin; they could still undo the communal peace so painfully...
...occasion was the eleventh annual conference of the All-India Adibasi Mahasabha, made up of delegates representing India's 25 million aborigines who are scattered among 176 tribes from Assam in the northeast to Madras in the deep south. One-fifth of India's first settlers live in the hillside jungles, many still dress in leaves, hunt with bow and arrows. The other four-fifths, touched by government, missionaries and modern industrialism, have found that civilization can be as ruthless as the man-eating tigers around their native villages. Cut off from their primitive tribal customs, most adibasis...
...government also banned two extremist Moslem groups. The politically powerful Mahasabha (Great Society), which has worked for all-Hindu rule in India, escaped official outlawing by resolving to shun political activity. But so far it had not dared to strike at the fiercely anti-Moslem Sikh groups. As the 13-day official period of mourning for the Mahatma ended, Hindus and Moslems waited to see what would come next...
...Hindus, opposing attempts at reconciliation. Orthodox Hindus resented his inroads on Hindu customs which Gandhi considered brutal, and therefore indefensible: untouchability, suttee (widow suicide), child marriages. Hindu and Sikh refugees from Moslem hate and murder, pouring into Delhi and other Indian cities, clamored for revenge. The militant Hindu organization Mahasabha (Great Society), to which Gandhi's assassin belonged, worked to make Indiaa purely Hindu state. Patel gave some encouragement to the extremists, which may partly explain why, at Gandhi's funeral, his head was bowed...
Violence broke out in India anew after Gandhi's death. Fifty were reported killed as-Gandhi admirers exacted a blood price from the Mahasabha extremists. Some dared to hope that Gandhi's injunction to abhor violence might take on added force from his martyrdom...