Dear Editor,
It would have been easy to dismiss the recent controversy erupting from President Ramotar’s characterisation of the APNU behaviour at polling places during the last elections, as it would have been similarly simple to entirely dismiss APNU’s marching and demonstrating after the polls and its declarations of suspicion levelled against the PPP/Civic. One would summarily have concluded, once again, that the nation is being led by mad men. Or at least the willingly delusional. But no. To take all or any of this seriously, the observer has to situate the protestations within an analysis of the narratives that inhabit the discursive spaces of the two parties, and the peoples that generated them. Narrative here in the sense of the ‘histories,‘ fictive at best, that each party weaves from the weft of miscomprehensions, outright lies, self-justifications and crazed imaginings it spins on the warp of hard fact that is the true reality of our lives.
So. the PPP cannot reconcile its self-image, and its founding myth of unwavering Indian-Guyanese loyalty, with the fact that it failed to win the expected majority at those elections. The narrative has to be adjusted to account for the loss. It reaches into its bag of stock villains and again pulls out a cliché of the PNC from its intimidating rigging days, and presents it to itself and to the faithful, as the reason it lost. It totally blanks the corruption and inefficiency, and the many small irritants, including the apparent lack of internal party democracy, for which it is felt to be responsible. Hence, at day‘s end, the very PNC that robbed it of it historic victories for 24 years, re-enters the narrative in its accustomed role of villain. Straight out of a soap opera about politics. The alternative would have been the Robert Persaud explanation about voters grown lazy with content and a surfeit of happiness. But then perhaps both explanations, in the PPP’s mind, have equal vailidity if taken in sequence.
Clearly these people are suffering the sort of cognitive dissonance from which only a succeeding defeat could grant relief. If they don’t put it down to bad eye, bad luck, or sorcery.
One avoided, in conversation with those of the family born and brought up in foreign climes, any comment on the PNC/APNU marching around in a tantrum after the elections. That party, like its fellow, seems disinclined to surrender the illusion that it can win free and fair elections as things stand. There was the suspicion, no, the certainty in some quarters, that the PPP/C had somehow cleverly manipulated the results through the SOPs, and had accorded the opposition less than the opposition’s due.
In the psychology of the PNC, by now wearied from the series of losses, its exculpatory posturing may even have started before the nation went to the polls. A sort of pre-rationalisation of defeat. One recalls a leading light predicting, two elections ago, that the PPP was planning to illegally truck thousands of fake voters from polling station to polling station and pad the rolls with the dead as with the unborn, in order to guarantee itself another seance at the trough. He had the thing published in the papers. Without a tempering comment from Congress Place.
Joe Jacobs, manager of boxer Max Schmelling is credited with a phrase that has become part of American English. It is, “We wuz robbed,“ as coming out of the mouth of a valiant fighter deprived of victory by underhand means. It is the post-election cry of each of the two major parties, we now learn, as they alternate in their inefficacy and recklessness. Of course each has done great good for the country but these demonstrations of puerility only distract from the performance of the many talented and dedicated men (and women) in their ranks
We are not even certain that they believe the things they are often quoted as emitting. Because what is for sure is that each, from time to time, plays to its own gallery. Granger perhaps let the marchers protest knowing full well they were just letting off steam. Black people style. He should, in commenting on Mr Ramotar’s pipe dream, acknowledge that the delusion may serve to send a message to the PPP faithful that it is no longer worth the distraction to go to the polling booth. That come hell or high water the PPP wins anyway. Except that in Ramotar’s version, the government no longer guarantees the sanctity and order of the polling station.
And Mr Ramotar, who may or may not be planning a snap election in case parliament becomes “intractable,“ is probably already working on the next excuse for a loss. But has, in the meantime to have something to say to his own gallery.
Disturbing about all of this is the realisation that for both the communities in which the two major parties are anchored, ‘defeat‘ and ‘victory‘ have so great a weight in their collective psyches that the politicians are driven to lies which they may not themselves believe, but may be persuaded as being necessary to pacify the followers. Perhaps, again, the best solution would be a formula under which both groups ‘win.‘ With the surety of economic justice and fairness for all if that is what both parties want. The problem here is the thing about ‘trust.’ Which, from the President’s last statement in the interview with Parvati Persaud-Edwards, is unlikely to be resolved when weighed against what we imagine to be the unalloyed joy with which the PPP has been living these last twenty years.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
