The Portuguese Colonial Act was adopted in 1930, and affected Portuguese India, sanctioning legal discrimination and differentiating them from the metropolitan Portuguese people. Adopted at the behest of António de Oliveira Salazar, then the Minister of Finance, this legal act caused Portuguese Indians to lose a number of benefits, including free trips to Portugal for rest and recreation, reduced allowances compared to white officials, and other facilities that the white Portuguese had overseas which were not made available to Portuguese Indians.This image of the easily adaptable Portuguese who populated the colonies of Africa and America, thanks to their lack of prejudice toward black and Indian women, was to remain one of the strongest ideological artifices of Portuguese colonisation