Word: jagan
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...backward Guiana. But the crown-appointed governor, Sir Alfred Savage, soon found that the Reds of the victorious People's Progressive Party, holding 18 of 24 seats in the legislature, were too hot to handle. Their Premier was a 33-year-old East Indian dentist named Cheddi Jagan (rhymes with pagan), a rapid-fire orator in both English and Creolise (an abused English spoken in the colony). But the real brains of the Communist movement was his blonde, Chicago-born wife, Janet Rosenberg Jagan...
Alone among Guiana's "Progressives," Janet Jagan, graduate of the U.S. Young Communist League, was trained in international Communism (although she says she now has no Communist Party connections). Daughter of a prosperous plumbing contractor who lived in Chicago and Detroit, she had finished 3½ years of college (Michigan State, Wayne, Detroit), and was a student nurse at Chicago's Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern in 1942. Ditching five other suitors, she married Cheddi, converted him to Marxism, helped him set up practice in British Guiana's capital...
Rumania Refresher. Starting the colony's first women's political group, stumping through the canebrakes to demand better housing for low-paid East Indian sugar workers, slim, serious Janet Jagan soon became the most talked-about woman in British Guiana. The waiting room of the Jagans' dental office became the meeting place of the discontented, and especially of those who sought independence for the colony. In 1947, after Jagan won a seat in the legislature, the Jagans sparked a bitter sugar strike in which five workers were killed. Founding the Progressive Party, Janet became secretary general...
...Communist propaganda. Then the new ministers fomented another big sugar strike that shut down the colony's main industry. When that petered out, they brought in a bill to force recognition of their Red-led union, and denounced "that man Savage" in open-air rallies. And when Janet Jagan drafted a party declaration demanding that London abolish the governor's control powers and other constitutional checks, the Colonial Office apparently decided that it was faced with a determined Red plot to seize full power...
...colony. Though news leaked from Bermuda that the cruiser Superb had sailed with sealed orders, there was no violence. As the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Marines fanned out to occupy key points around Georgetown, and the radio announced suspension of the constitution and dismissal of the legislature, Premier Jagan made the understatement of the week: "We are most unhappy about the situation." He and the other Red-tinged ministers were not detained or molested in any way, but the legislature's dismissal had neatly squeezed them out of their jobs...