Word: goa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sticky monsoon rains pelted the little band of marchers as they sloshed up the mud-laden roads toward the border of Goa. The long-heralded invasion was on. In the lush, Rhode Island-sized Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, 4,000 African troops and 1,000 Goan police waited, guns loaded and aimed. In far-off Lisbon, frantic crowds prayed in churches and demonstrated in the streets against the coming onslaught on Portugal's ancient colony...
...saluted the Indian tricolored flag which they carried, for the day was India's Independence Day. Finally the marchers reached a sagging chain across their path. Behind the chain stood seven Goan policemen and a small dog. Undaunted, the little band stepped over the chain and tramped into Goa...
...miles north, two other groups of peaceful invaders, one with 20 marchers, another with ten, all Goans, walked calmly into the little colony. Back at his headquarters in the Indian town of Karwar, 46-year-old Peter Alvares. president of the National Congress of Goa and mastermind of the unarmed invasion to "liberate" the colony, insisted that all this was according to plan: he had instructed his liberators to scatter among the people of Goa and preach freedom until captured...
Portugal, however, felt passionately different about its numerous picturesque fragments on India's west coast. Goa, chief among them, is the symbol of a golden age of Portuguese conquest four centuries ago and important to Catholic Portuguese as the final resting place of St. Francis Xavier. Goa is also economi cally profitable: last year the port exported more than $11 million worth of manganese and iron ore. In Lisbon, Nehru's designs on Goa were greeted by obstinate fury. Lisbon's Diario de Noticias angrily denounced Nehru as a misguided forerunner of Communism. "The spectacular show staged...
India's nationalists served notice of a "peaceful" march on Goa in observance of India's Independence Day (Aug. 15). Portugal's scholarly strongman, President Salazar. countered by dispatching a frigate and more troops to reinforce his "Rome of the East...