Word: jagan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Oliver Lyttelton defended his action in rushing warships and troops to Guiana to prevent a Communist coup (TIME, Oct. 19). Lyttelton accused the Guiana People's Progressive Party of 1) seeking to establish a one-party Communist state, 2) spreading racial hatred. He cited evidence that Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the East Indian dentist whom Lyttelton deposed from his post as Prime Minister, had conspired to organize a Red "People's Police.'' Two of Jagan's Cabinet ministers and his American wife Janet, a former Young Communist who became the deputy speaker of the colony...
Beetle-browed Cheddi Jagan, 35. had flown to Britain, confidently expecting a bonanza of Socialist sympathy. With him, flashing the three-fingered salute of the P.P.P.. was his Minister of Education; an Oxford-educated Negro named Linden Forbes Burnham. The pair were met at London Airport by a bunch of British Communists, but before they could mount a soapbox, Scotland Yard whisked them away to a private office on the Opposition side of the House of Commons. Clement Attlee, whose government had prepared the way for self-government in Guiana, had urgent questions to ask. He had been disturbed...
Rather than having adopted tactics usually associated with dictatorships rather than democracies, Britain should have prepared a case against the Jagan faction before moving. It is doubtful that the projected uprising was imminent. Certainly Jagan realized that neither Her Majesty's government nor our own would tolerate an armed Communist rebellion in South America. Besides, Communist sympathizers already had legal control of the government through the ballot. It was precisely because the Communists had so much actual power that Britain had to send in non-Guianan troops...
...Jagan government was plotting a rebellion, the evidence to support such a charge in court should have been gathered before troops landed. And, when the British established martial law, they ought, simultaneously, to have arrested the leaders of the conspiracy and charged them with answerable crimes...
...other hand, if there was no evidence that Jagan planned to do more than legally entrench his power, England should also have kept the peace and law. When Communists win power while obeying the rules of democracy, they should only be turned out on a succeeding election day. Any system that arbitrarily crushes a legal colonial government does nothing to better the social and political atmosphere that made the colonists elect that government in the first place...