Dear Editor,
I welcome the opportunity to continue the dialogue that Mr. Dev wishes us to pursue. I say” us” because there are some outstanding African Guyanese who can set out, better than I can, the affirmative African position of writers like Dr. George James. I would prefer to see Mr. Dev on the East Indian side of this debate because he is one of the few, to respect the distinctiveness of our respective cultures and to recommend that we give explicit consideration to that distinctiveness in our development plans. Distinguished Professor Clive Thomas, has pointed out that we have had a half century of racial battles over political power and have not thought of settling that war with economic arrangements for the benefit of each race. We pretend that we are all one and the 2007 Budget continues with that pretence.
Brother Kwayana proposed the solution of a joint premiership in 1961 as it became evident that East Indians were not willing to accept an African premier and that Africans similarly did not wish to be governed under an East Indian premiership. Mr. Ravi Dev, in 1989, proposed a federal solution to Guyana’s racial struggle.
The clashes between East Indians and other races in Third World Countries gave rise to the First Global Convention of People of Indian Origin in New York in 1989, which Mr. Dev attended. Since then, the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) has acknowledged that the situation that gave rise to GOPIO has improved, leading to the present circumstance in which the GOPIO has now decided to pool its resources, both financial and professional, for the benefit of (1) the People of Indian Origin (PIO), (2) the countries they come from and (3) India. My concern has been with (2), namely “benefit of the countries they come from.”
The GOPIO has an impressive website and all Guyanese with internet access should visit the website at http://www.gopio.org. The Constitution of the GOPIO sets out the objectives in relation to the overall goal in great detail. As expected, in the context in which the GOPIO was formed, the emphasis is indeed on bonding within the Indian group. Mr. Dev says that the GOPIO would heartily agree with me that such bonding should not “permit us from striving towards racial parity” though I would not characterise the agreement as “hearty.”
Objective 2 (b) of the GOPIO Constitution states: “To help the Indian communities in different countries to promote legitimate secular and developmental interests of the countries in which they are resident.”
Objective 2 (d) states: “To mobilise professional, financial, and intellectual resources of the community of Indians abroad for their mutual advancement and for the development of their country of origin.”
Although the objectives must necessarily be general, Mr. Dev does not encourage including sufficient specificity in them for the objectives of addressing deficiencies in Hinduism. We “cannot
