Word: ceylon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...eleven years since it won independence from Britain, Ceylon has had a cautious, conservative government and a wild-eyed Socialist one. Last week, in the third year of the Socialist administration of frail, fidgety Premier Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, 60, Ceylon sweltered in the pre-monsoon heat. In the capital city of Colombo, the stores were packed with luxury goods, the streets jammed with cars, the sidewalks filled with smiling people and saffron-robed Buddhist monks under black umbrellas. In the lush countryside there were signs of the paralyzing drought that had lasted for months. But the island...
Little Outbreak. There seems to be no hint in Ceylon of last year's bestial communal riots between Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese, in which an estimated 1,000 died-some of them soaked with kerosene and burned alive (TIME, June 16, 1958). Premier Bandaranaike now refers to the riots, largely caused by his own ineptitude, as "one of those little outbreaks." In addition to the riots, "Banda" has buoyantly survived incessant strikes, a rising cost of living, unemployment, a flight of capital, floods, drought and hysterical politics. Having survived so much, Banda has a fair chance to last...
...handsome, sleepy-eyed Trotskyite,* "is the mutual dread of an election." By gently shifting his influence, Banda alternately encourages and hampers Gunawardena in his proposals for land reform and rural cooperatives; little has been done to fulfill election promises of nationalizing tea and rubber plantations, or of turning Ceylon into a model Socialist country...
...worked out badly. Of 16 ambitious projects to be set up with Soviet Russian aid, only one-a sugar factory-is beyond the planning stage. Banda's smiles are currently lavished on the U.S. aid missions, which since 1956 have spent $36 million on a variety of Ceylon's problems, from malaria control to extending the runways at Colombo airport. More than 1,600,000 schoolchildren get a daily glass of milk and a bun from U.S. surplus foods. Even glowering, anti-American Food Minister Gunawardena works closely with U.S. people on agricultural and irrigation projects...
Economically better off than India, politically no more unstable than Indonesia, Ceylon moves imperfectly forward-but it does move. Said a Western observer to a TIME correspondent in Colombo last week: "It's utterly chaotic, and yet I'm less worried about Ceylon today than I was a year ago. If the Ceylonese have learned anything from the British, I guess it is the art of muddling through...