Dear Editor,
Mr Ellis’s letters about race are anachronistic since they are dealing with a milieu of 50 years ago which has passed away. Mr Ellis’ fixation could be due to the fact that he has been an exile abroad for some time. May I point out the following fallacies in his letter of 6/2/07.
(1) Pandit Gossai is certainly not looking for a job. He has a reputation of being an utterly decent, very able, gentle and fair man, and as an advisor to the President, his task is not to advise on religion. Religion was never part of Pandit Gossai’s terms of reference, this is purely a misapprehension of Mr Ellis. Those who wish to prevent such high-quality people from serving in any government administration would be doing a wrong thing for Guyana and ultimately for themselves. European governments over the centuries have used talented churchmen to help them in the task of effective government as for example Cardinal Richlieu and Cardinal Mazarin of Louis XIV.
(2) Mr Ellis and other associates of his like Mr Colin Bascom are more worried about the Indian caste system than the Indians themselves. The Indians, with their caste system and their numerous self-declared ills, have been building up a country of remarkable economic, political and scientific and intellectual success. They and China are moving into the Great Power League and Indian and Chinese civilizations are moving back into their ancient status of world civilizations. I would advise Mr. Ellis to improve his reading on this issue and also to study the Indian social and political activities in dealing with the ills of their caste system where their last President, scores of MPs and professionals, the writer of their Constitution and their Chief Justice are dalits. For Mr Ellis’s edification, all the very recent studies done of East Indian people in Guyana and Trinidad have found that caste is almost absent from their consciousness.
(3) Mr Ellis and others of his ilk talk of achieving “racial parity” and in Mr Ellis’s words “I am intellectually challenged in relation to the difficult task of achieving racial parity while achieving racial diversity.” African Guyanese have been a declining minority and today number 30% approx of the population. Yet they occupy the greatest number of government jobs and in places like the Bank of Guyana it has remained 90% non-Indian as in the days of Mr Ellis’ management of that institution. It would be wise to leave Guyanese society to make its own equilibrial adjustments rather than trying to engineer racial quotas.
(4) Mr Ellis often takes up the position that more independent and financially stronger local government would be a good thing. I agree but the units he is advocating are too small and would ultimately be dependant upon central government with central government control. A better solution is to have a version of the Swiss Constitution where there would be big enough units which would be financially independent and be able to run their affairs without central government interference. The Swiss type of constitution would cut out the worry of central government.
Yours faithfully,
R Williams
