From Chicago to Guyana: Janet Rosenberg Jagan takes over as president

Progressive, The, Feb, 1998 by William Steif

The British rulers slapped heavy restrictions on Guyanese politicians, and in early 1954, Cheddi was jailed for six months for violating a rule--he traveled out of town. The day Cheddi was released, Janet was jailed.

"I was jailed for attending a Hindu thing called a Yag, and I had a copy of Nehru's book," she says. "The British called it a political meeting--illegal, though there were prayers. They raided the house for prohibited literature. There were some political books, some stuff by Lenin. And they planted a police manual. I'm sure it was planted. We weren't supposed to have such things. We had our choice a fine or jail. We decided no fines, go to jail, civil disobedience. Cheddi's father tried to pay my fine. I had to stop him. We were resisting the colonialists."

She was in jail nearly six months. But that didn't alter her political outlook, which has remained consistent over the years.

"Cheddi and I always have believed in socialism," she says. "To us that meant getting rid of oppression, so the poor man can get out of this poverty, get the fruits of the country. Now, after the Cold War, there's a new human global order, a different global outlook. Now all the spending for arms can go elsewhere. We can get rid of wars and poverty."

In 1957, the British restored constitutional rule and the People's Progressive Party won the election. Janet Jagan was reelected to the legislature and became minister of labor, health, and housing. "In four years, we did pretty good. We opened lands to housing, brought in new riverboats," she says. "I was considered the minister who got things done. I took bureaucrats into the country to show them how people lived, set up a network of doctors and dentists a dozen health clinics, got about 5,000 houses and apartments built with very low rents, like $20 a month. There was no bribery or favoritism, people who needed help got it--mainly blacks in the slums got it."

In 1961, the Burnham-led People's National Congress challenged them. "We won again, and all hell blew out as the CIA spent a lot of money on the PNC," Jagan says. It was the early years of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution. The CIA and Britain's MI5 "tried to destabilize the government, tried to get us out of government by stimulating a racial war, by creating antagonism between blacks and East Indians."

In 1963, Janet Jagan became minister of home affairs, which is supposed to control the police, but "the commissioner of police sent reinforcements to the mining town of Mackenzie, dozens were slaughtered, the town's whole East Indian population had to be evacuated. I resigned because the commissioner wouldn't follow my instructions."

She remembers one terrorist attack that occurred at the headquarters of the People's Progressive Party. "There was the Progressive Bookshop below the second-floor headquarters of the PPP in Georgetown. An Afro-American woman who worked there saw a box and asked, `What's this doing here?' No one knew, some man came in and didn't take his change. The woman told [party member] Michael Forde, `Just to be safe, take it out.' Michael took it and was crossing the street toward the cinema when it blew up. If it had blown up in the bookshop, there would've been about sixty people killed or injured. Michael was killed, a few people were injured, Michael's hand was blown off and landed in front of the cinema." The book shop now carries Michael Forde's name.