The first “untouchable” woman to head a state government was sworn for a third term as chief minister of India’s biggest and politically crucial northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Former schoolteacher Mayawati, leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)” was invited to form the government after she forged an alliance with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has its support base among the upper castes. Mayawati, 47, was sworn into office by Uttar Pradesh Governor Vishnu Kant Shastri amid cheers from thousands of her party followers. Mayawati’s previous two terms in the state’s highest elected office were also achieved with the support of the BJP. In both cases, the governments lasted only a few months because of the bitter infighting over power-sharing between the BJP and BSP. No single party in the state elections got close to the 202 seats required to secure a majority in the 403-member legislature.
Other important events
1765 The first US medical school, University of Pennsylvania, is founded.
1802 Washington DC is incorporated as a city.
1841 New Zealand is formally proclaimed a British colony.
1845 Fire kills 1,600 in a popular theatre in Canton, China.
1913 The first full-length Indian feature film Raja Harishchandra is released.
1921 West Virginia imposes the first state sales tax.
1936 The French People’s Front wins elections.
1937 American writer Margaret Mitchell is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘Gone with the Wind’.
1947 Japan forms a constitutional democracy.
1960 The musical ‘The Fantasticks’ opens off-Broadway, beginning a record run of nearly 42 years and 17,162 performances.
1962 An express train crashes into wreckage of a commuter train and a freight train, killing 163 people in Tokyo, Japan.
1963 Martin Luther King Jr delivers his landmark speech on civil rights.
1969 Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is arrested in Toronto for possession of heroin.
1971 Erich Honecker succeeds Walter Ulbricht as East German party leader.
1986 A massive bomb rips apart an Air Lanka Lockheed L-1011 at Colombo airport minutes before take-off for Maldives, killing 20 passengers.
1999 Mireya Moscoso wins the election as Panama’s first woman president.
2000 Militants kill four Filipino hostages including a priest in the southern Philippines’ island of Basilan.
2001 The US loses its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.
2002 A ferry carrying hundreds of people sinks in a storm on the Meghna River, Bangladesh.
2003 James Miller, a British freelance journalist, is shot and killed by an Israeli military tank in the Gaza Strip.
2005 Iraq’s first democratically elected government is sworn in.
2006 An Armenian airliner carrying 113 people tumbles into the Black Sea harbour of the Russian resort of Sochi.
2007 Sudan and Chad sign a Saudi-brokered reconciliation deal, requiring both sides to cooperate with the UN to stabilise Darfur.
2008 Cyclone Nargis strikes Myanmar, killing at least 78,000 and leaving 56,000 others missing.
2013 Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali, special prosecutor in the Benazir Bhutto murder case, is shot dead in Islamabad.
2016 The UAE announces a 10-year National Policy for Reading to encourage the habit of reading.
