Dear Editor,
The AFC has presented its Action Plan. It would be the first manifesto to be unveiled, marking the start of a new phase of the election cycle.
It is a document that appears well conceived, promising an approach to public administration that is people-oriented. It also, we read, has taken on board an idea that in Guyana perhaps originated with Ravi Dev and the ROAR militants – the idea of the Ethnic Impact Study as an indispensible to all project planning.
Then, looking at the last fortnight’s news and noting a complaint by the Indian Arrival Committee, we observe that another ROAR-coloured idea is apparently rolled out by Khemraj Ramjattan. It is that Indians should not vote out of fear. The ROAR formulation takes the form that the average Indian-Guyanese is voting race out of fear of the rival African-Guyanese group, whose bullying he suffered, and hence by a kind of Lamarkian transmission of racial culture is instinctually voting against as a protective measure. Mr Ramjattan merely spoke about fear and did not as far as I read, deal with the idea in terms and implications as stated in the preceding sentence. There is something worrying about some of the talents that have floated to the fore over at the AFC. The AFC at this point in its history increasingly appears a trojan horse for certain ROAR politicians beached after that party ran aground and demobilised. We learn that, apart from Tarron Khemraj, a former top ROAR executive named Salahudeen Nasrudeen is now over at the AFC. Amar Panday, a third, turned the spotlight on himself with recent letters in the Kaieteur News decrying the “unproductive propensity to ethnic politics.” In other words a ringing disavowal of all he militated for a few short years ago. He goes further and lets us know that the reason the PNC lost votes to the AFC was that Trotman is brighter than anything the PNC has produced. Ravi Dev must take note of the correlation he sets up between brains and voter appeal. This could be enlightenment, the scales falling from the eyes of these brethren once the last election results had shown that ROAR was rolling or being driven into oblivion. Or this could be what is called “a transhumance” – heading for green pasturage as the season changes.
The image we retain is that of a group of political migrants that, having failed to take root in the Indian sector, nimbly crosses over to a rising star in the opposing African camp. We learn therefore from Mr Panday that “with the incorporation and growth of the AFC the PNC has become a historical artifact.” This should be bad news for Congress Place. Except that I recall similar prophecies of doom directed against and at the PPP before the last elections, predicting that with ROAR “armed and dangerous” (with these new ideas), the PPP was already having its shroud measured and the wood for its funeral pyre on order. But perhaps between the core of the AFC and the new ROARian immigrants there is a “confluence of interests.” The AFC perhaps feels it needs to attract Indian votes and therefore has an interest in keeping in its camp those of Indianity represented by the ex-Roarites. And the ex-Roarites need a host even though some among them have in the past expressed questionable views. Have they changed?
Let us in understanding and generosity offer that we all evolve, grow up, re-conceptualise our world and our personal objectives. Plus, there has been a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing in the history of our politicians. Were we to do a census of the politicians who moved from PPP to PNC over the last fifty years, or from UF to PPP and UF to PNC, or from PNC to PPP, a remarkable pattern would become perceptible. Revealed would be the fact that behind the constant public cussing out that the politicians employ as a stress-release mechanism or merely as part of the theatricals of their politics, a quite exemplary camaraderie is created. And endures. Examples here are too numerous to mention. No “ethnic security dilemma” impedes the steady progress of these people. And it is not a fact of the political life of Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians in the same way as it is here.
So, the AFC, the party formed by political dissidents from the two majors, has become a refuge of sorts for activists whose culture and praxis is or was diametrically opposed to the racial detente the AFC has proffered as its raison d’etre.
Upon reading the quote attributed to Mr Ramjattan, one is immediately reminded that the foundation stone of ROAR ideology has been the hypothetical “ethnic security dilemma.” Planted in the thin soil of this hypothesis is, as we stated earlier, the false idea that Indians vote PPP or pro-Indian solely out of a fear of African-Guyanese. In the scraggly undergrowth around this idea we find others such as the idea that Creole culture is inferior, etc. It is a fear that was presented as quite rational because it was rooted in long historical experience. We do not know to what extent these ideas have invaded the consciousness of the AFC and what exactly Mr Trotman and other leaders are thinking on any given day. But to base its political analysis of ethnic voting, or its programme, on ideas imported from questionable sources, does not suggest a good start. Whatever the Action Plan may promise or suggest. Besides, the ethnic insecurity hypothesis is defective in many ways, including its ignoring of racial voting by groups other than Africans and Indians. It lacks explanatory virtues.
This writer does not accept that the ROAR hypothesis is confirmable by history or the social psychology of Indian-Guyanese and credits ethnic voting, by any and all groups here, to factors such as racial affinities and the sociology of migration, settlement and group-identity creation. While fears, real or rhetorical, would be in the mix, they are not the dominant element. We have written here that, simultaneous with the creation of a positive group identity has been the creation of a counter-identity attributed the ‘Other’ and the Others, that is often antagonistic and negative in some ways, and perhaps admiring in others.
In short we see in the binaries that emerge a much more complex interplay of groups than the mere alternance of “fears.” How each race sees and classifies each of the five others adds a layer of complexity to the racial question that dilutes its concentration on Indian-African questions.
Having made this clear, the cause of the worry is exposed and should now be clearly stated. Is the AFC’s world-view and its interpretation of Guyanese history and the roles of its ethnic groups going to be adulterated by ideas brought over by ex-ROARites now nesting with Trotman, Holder, Ramjattan, etc?
The matter interrogates us in all its immediacy when we reflect and reiterate that the AFC is, in electoral terms, a party that takes its strength primarily (though not exclusively) from the African-coloured segment of the electorate. From the feared.
The AFC must bring some new clarity to the question of its attitude to racial voting. And let us know urgently if the ex-ROARites have genuinely changed their views, or are slowly corrupting the salad-bowl over there?
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
