Word: goa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Western statesmen can draw a profound, though scarcely new, lesson from India's victorious aggression in Goa: that the world's newer nations are going to act in very much the same fashion as its older ones. Which is to say that the newer nations will wage nationalist wars, mask their territorial ambitions with a rhetoric of self-determination and self-defense, and go unpunished...
...easy to see why Nehru chose this moment to invade the three Portuguese enclaves on India's west coast, though it is impossible to condone an assertion of Indian self-interest at the expense of the Goan people. The Goa adventure compensates for Nehru's failure to prevent a Chinese military occupation of some 12,000 miles of Indian Himilayan territory. Facing elections and a storm of criticism from the Indian nationalist right, the Prime Minister has taken the easy, demagogue's path of opening a new and popular anti-colonialist front...
...defensive on the northern frontier, India was on the offensive against the tiny, 456-year-old Portuguese colony of Goa, 1,300 miles to the southwest. Hopefully trying to scare the Portuguese colonial authorities into going home, Nehru had massed Indian army regulars on the Goa border. "Goa is a constant irritant," said Nehru. "It must come to India." The situation in Goa, he declared, was "intolerable." Actually Goa (1,300 sq. mi.) was only, as Nehru once said, a pimple on the face of India, embarrassing because it was still a colonial territory on the Indian subcontinent...
...former imperial powers of Europe, tiny Portugal has clung desperately to all its overseas possessions, refusing to surrender so much as a foot of territory. Britain gave up India; France gave up its Indian enclaves; but for all of Nehru's huffing and puffing, Portugal hung on to Goa. Last week stubborn Portugal was forced to give up at least the first inch of empire...
...every rebel killed and village burned was costing Portugal more prestige in the eyes of the watching world. In New Delhi, India's Prime Minister Nehru (who has already thrown the Portuguese out of two small enclaves and would like to put them out of Goa, on India's west coast) urged the United Nations to invoke economic sanctions against Portugal because of the "tremendous revulsion of feeling all over the world" to events in Angola that are, he said, "horrible almost beyond belief...