Word: goa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...done it again. Not content with his "mass retaliation" blunder, he again stumbled, this time apparently after looking very carefully at the pit before him. Searching for peace, Dulles again has dropped a bomb, needlessly irritating a people whom we hope to secure as allies. By referring to Goa as a Portuguese province Dulles managed to enrage the Indians. And amazingly enough, after having aroused them for no good purpose, he still refuses, in his good old blunt way, to offer any conciliation...
...like poison gas, can blow back in the faces of those who use it. Last week India's Prime Minister Nehru decided that India had been soul-forced enough for the time being. Reliance on soul force, or satyagraha, had resulted in 22 deaths on the border of Goa, but it had neither led the Portuguese to give up their tiny 400-year-old colony, nor bestirred the Goans to do anything about their own liberation...
Last week the time had come to assert the ascendancy of police force over soul force. First Nehru ordered that there be no more satyagraha against Goa. "As a government," he said, "we obviously cannot have satyagraha against another government. Governments do not do that sort of thing." Then, exerting all the strength of his prestige and popularity, Nehru compelled the Congress Party executive to reverse its Goa resolution of last July and vote, ruefully but unanimously, to renounce satyagraha as a method of political action, "whether undertaken individually or collectively...
Nehru Fights Back. In the New Delhi Parliament, while mobs paraded outside, Nehru declared the Portuguese action in Goa "brutal and uncivilized," but added: "We will not be forced or hustled into what we consider wrong action . . . The Portuguese are deliberately trying to provoke us." At a specially summoned meeting of the parliamentary parties, he denounced the riots, accused opposition parties, especially the Communists, of organizing the riots deliberately to discredit him. Next day in Parliament he apologized to all foreign missions and foreign firms who had suffered, offered full compensation...
...Nehru. The influential Times of India attacked him for "vacillation, contradiction and appeasement." The Bombay Free Press Journal accused the premier of "obliquely encouraging the satyagrahis with vague, irresponsible statements that satyagraha will solve the problems of Goan freedom." Many influential Indians, itching for a little direct action in Goa, were asking, "What do we spend $400 million a year on an army for?" But Nehru clung stubbornly to what he called his "basic policy of peaceful approach." He cautiously added: "Of course there may be variations...