Dear Editor,
Over the past several weeks, in part due to the columns by Mr. Ralph Ramkarran you published, there has been comment and review of the political life and legacy of Dr Cheddi Jagan.
Mr. Ramkarran, in my estimation, has made two points essential to any evaluation of the methods and mentality of the PPP. The first concerns the creation and sustenance of an atmosphere of racial fear, which is central to the party’s discourse and encoded in the several refrains of the style “Remember the 28 years.” The second point Mr Ramkarran made is that there has been a rupture with the standards and rhetoric of the late Dr. Jagan, and that the PPP as it now exists represents a betrayal of the principles and history of the party. To my mind there has been continuity, rather than rupture and betrayal.
The insights provided by the conversationtree.gy columns are essential to any reading of Guyanese politics, precisely because they have to be understood not as examples of a departure from pre-existing standards and treachery, but must be seen as the coming to the fore of factors that were already present in the PPP and which surfaced with the return to power of the group around Dr. Jagan. We have therefore to agree with the former Speaker that Dr. Jagan failed to put in place systems to impede the hijacking of the party by some of its negative elements.
At the start of the 28 years, when the PNC in coalition with the United Force took office in 1964, a period of PPP government had just ended. Memories of the PPP were fresh in all minds. Mr. Forbes Burnham in his typically frank style could comment both on the cultivation of fear that was the PPP’s fond de commerce, and the corruption that had already, by that time, come to characterise its occupation of the corridors of power.
A Youtube recording of former President Burnham has him say “Enemies of this country would like to see racial division and antagonism continue…and sought to convince Indian citizens that they have cause to fear…” He describes the PPP’s campaign method as “a dishonest and opportunistic propaganda that unless that government (PPP) was returned to power, those people would suffer.”
The PPP’s platform has therefore always or frequently been simply about the exploitation of racial fear and resentment. The presentation of “fear” as the emotion underlying racism is common in the literature of race. And it is frequently followed by what Mr. Burnham said and what Mr. Ramkarran, and so many others, have confirmed. In Burnham’s words “We cannot and will not condone and accept the nepotism and corruption of the past seven years.”
Which is to say that the fear-mongering at Babu Jaan (guns for PNC supporters if the opposition wins) and the high level of tolerance for nepotism and corruption should not be seen as departures from a history of high ideals, but as the continuation of a governance malpractice now indelibly associated with the PPP.
The PPP/ Indian constituency and Dr. Jagan have had a strange relationship. To put the best interpretation on matters. Dr Jagan has, historically, been unable to stem the tides on which this part of the electorate is borne. His personal example would not suffice, his admonitions would prove ineffectual, his ideological anti-materialism essentially without effect, in the face of impulses that were deeply rooted and overwhelming.
Dr. Jagan would survive during his lifetime, as the revered figure he had become, and after his death as icon. But the historical facts lead us to conclude that the negative aspects of his party’s governance were dysfunctions he was prepared to live with.
Over time, the PPP has retreated from some positions it had earlier supported. “Down with Sandys” and Proportional Representation, would be forgotten once it became obvious that even with PR the party could win. The peculiar constitution of the state, seen as despicable in the hands of Burnham, would be retained when the party replaced the previous government. The Marxism-Leninism would yield to the realpolitik required by the times as objective conditions changed at the start of the 1990s.
In all this, I do not recall Dr Jagan doing any public education of his followers on the question of racial fear. If anything at all he soon fell into the unconscious self-ridicule of declaring at public fora that Indians in this country were living in conditions similar to apartheid.
There is nothing wrong with Dr. Jagan being an Indian leader. He largely supplanted the Middle Class Indian elite of the forties and fifties and the MPCA as sugar union. Indians at that time, still culturally distinguishable from the rest of the population already highly creolised for the most part, required a leadership with which they could identify and which understood the culture and the needs. Generally Dr. Jagan, who invariably regarded with nostalgia the good old days of the united multi-racial PPP, was large enough of spirit to have been a leader of all the peoples of the country. But the nature of anti-colonialist politics would mean that the fissures in the country would reproduce themselves in its political organisation. Not only would it be a case of competing races, but, essentially, of competing values and world-views.
The racial split, inevitable as it would be, was too deep to be healed by either Jagan or Burnham. The narratives internalised and the socialisation of the children of each of the major racial groups would mean that the discourse of fear and the practice of corruption would continue to exist and, after independence and the new government, simply co-exist with the faults that the PNC itself brought from its cultural and ethnic base.
For the PPP to wean itself off the fear discourse and the shady deals, not only has it to confront and to disassemble the discourse elaborated around these two figments. It has to move on to a higher appreciation of an electorate it has long considered captive and to whom it saw itself bound by a certain range of sentiments towards Others. The Indians of today are descended from the faithful of the fifties and sixties, but if Dr Jagan was shy to say in public that they had to evolve out of ethnic suspicion and fear, there are Indian leaders now who have attacked the problem. One has to understand Ramjattan’s campaign speeches on the subject in this vein. The courage of the AFC Indians paid. What is the lesson in this for the PPP?
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
