Word: jagan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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History was coming full circle in the poverty-ridden crown colony of British Guiana last week. Four years ago, in the country's first general election, Communism-spouting Cheddi B. Jagan, a suave, U.S.-educated East Indian dentist (Northwestern University, '43), startled the complacent British by sweeping into office. The followers of his People's Progressive Party shouted, "We guv'ment!", and Jagan boasted that they would shoot their "oppressors." Six months later, 700 British troops and three warships deposed Chief Minister Jagan, suspended the colony's constitution. Next week, under a cautiously revised constitution...
...Jagan's P.P.P. is favored in the battle of four leftish parties largely because the British gave him two major assists. First, they booted him out of office in 1953 before the people could be disillusioned at his lack of an overall program and his patent lack of administrative ability. Says one rival politician: "He should have been allowed enough rope to hang himself." Thus, to the voters, Jagan is still a martyred hero. Then, after belatedly setting up an $84 million emergency-aid program to quiet rising discontent, the British ruined the effect by slowing down expenditures...
Starting with these advantages, Left-Winger Jagan, 39, is acting like a moderate as he campaigns with his wife Janet, once a Chicago Young Communist Leaguer. He denies that he is a Communist, although government officials are convinced he keeps in close touch with the Kremlin. He talks of forming a postelection coalition with a former ally, Forbes Burnham, 36, a mercurial Negro lawyer with Communist leanings of his own, whose splinter wing of the P.P.P. may win up to four seats...
...first and only Premier, Communist Cheddi Jagan, British Guiana could now be far along the road to a stable economy and peaceful self-government. As far back as 1945, Britain earmarked $10 million for the country's long-term development. But in early 1954, when it came time to draw up new requests for aid from Britain, the colony's first try at self-government had blown up in the ouster of Jagan. In the political confusion left behind by the Commonwealth's first Communist Premier, no one ever got around to applying for Guiana...
Left unanswered was the question that has been dangling ever since Jagan's removal from office and the suspension of the colony's constitution: When will self-government be reestablished? The likely answer: when the flow of development funds has put an end to the ragged poverty, the mud-hut living standards and widespread unemployment that combined to bring Communist Jagan to power in the first place...