Dear Editor,
Please allow me to make a brief response to two letters captioned: “Indian loyalty should not be construed as due to loyalty to the PPP but to fear of being ostracised or attacked” by an unnamed writer, and “By its works shall the Alliance be judged” by Barrington Braithwaite.
I have been thinking about the statement in the first letter, “What cements the Indian vote is fear of what the PPP and fellow Indians will do to him should he break the rules of community relations.” This is somewhat factual but to what extent is this actually so and how much is that fear embedded in the psyche of the Indian voter today.
As I look back at election campaigns since 1964, I know it was strong up to1992 and was very glaring when Mr Ravi Dev ran as an independent. In that case, it was reported that persons were standing almost in the polling booth on the West Coast threatening persons. I do not see this as a treacherous mountain to surmount because I know for a fact that many East Indians were not caught up in that norm and have openly shown support for the PNC and recently the AFC.
Working class and poor East Indians were victims of these threats but as GAWU (hopefully) and future political candidates expose the faults and inefficiencies of their leadership that strategy will become useless. Our task is to create the environment in Guyana to nullify those sentiments and gradually build on the positive development to get it to a point where Guyanese can vote issues and not ethnicity. I have noticed the tendency of some persons to attack the messenger without analyzing the message of our political discussion. I have detected some of this in Mr Braithwaite’s letter. Lin-Jay Harry-Voglezon wrote a good piece captioned, “African Guyanese leaders must be much more development oriented”, which I think adequately described the pitfalls of the African community. I do not have to know the man or his background and that should not be the issue. Evaluate his statement to see if it makes sense. What he wrote falls in line with what I have concluded.
Mr Braithwaite also wants to know about me. He has not addressed what I wrote but is assuming that I am living in the US for a length of time and questions my knowledge of Guyana by asking if I am in business. The truth is that I missed only the 2006 election. I was self-employed in Guyana from 1983 and left after the 2001 elections. At the time of leaving Guyana, I had completed five years in the timber industry being the owner of a State Forest Permit.
I previously promoted both Indian and English entertainment, (I was once the bass player for The Merrytones during the good days of the ‘East meets West in Music’ and did jams with The Originals) the most famous being Startime’91 which was held at the Sports Hall in December 1991,
Although my name does not ring a bell, Mr Braithwaite did a lot of artwork for my promotions. He knows me personally. We also rubbed shoulders along with personalities like Hazel Marshall, Roxanne Hazel and Kwesi Oginga during my stint with ACDA.
Yours faithfully,
F. Skinner
