Dear Editor,
The purpose of education is to form a repository of knowledge from which to deduce solutions to problems in society. It also seeks to transmit such knowledge and increasing gains in the frontiers of thinking to future generations. Intellectuals are individuals who make the search for truth a matter of principle and are guided by the discipline of ethics which facilitates the unbiased dissertation of historical and new knowledge.
Swami Aksharananda’s letter (SN Apr 28/15) demonstrates that of a studied individual who could be possibly considered an intellectual given his attempt to use history to inform and guide our decisions. Unfortunately, he, like many other highly educated individuals, manages to set aside the discipline of ethics, if this is indeed a position on which he would claim to pin his analysis, as a means creating racial insecurities and perpetuating ethnic fears in our society to generate support for the PPP.
Conveniently disregarding the PPP’s own systematic social and economic abuses, Aksharananda’s Achilles heel in his letter, where ethics is dropped in the discussion, is that he seeks to assert that Indians perceive themselves to be victims of the PNC’s years under Burnham He wisely seeks to disassociate himself from this assertion, for which he has provided no basis. It is a matter of fact that the PPP and their apologists have sought to project and maintain this fallacy in the psyche of Indian Guyanese.
Aksharananda and many other PPP sympathizers will continue to perpetuate racial insecurity and ethnic divisions in our society for political gain at the expense of social and economic progress. This practice is one which must be immediately rebuffed, and the media must further commit themselves to regulating these and similar fallacies out of their publications.
I have myself recently penned a letter which addressed this issue, which has once again been raised, to Stabroek News, which the editor of Stabroek News finds it journalistically prudent not to publish.
The summary on the PNC’s years is that the majority of the population, typically workers, regardless of race, endured the social and economic hardships at the time which were due to what can only be termed an experiment with socialism in Guyana up until the death of Burnham. Subsequent to Burnham’s death, the Hoyte administration embarked on a programme with the IMF to move Guyana to a market-based system. He also removed import restrictions which saw the return of ‘banned’ commodities back to our shelves.
African Guyanese suffered as well as Indian Guyanese, and the point has already been made and acknowledged that African Guyanese voted with Indian Guyanese to install Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the People’s Progressive Party into government in 1992, notwithstanding the efforts of the PNC under Hoyte to deliver economic transformation and growth, the benefits of which were seen in the first five to seven years of the PPP administration. Even this the PPP have falsely claimed to be a result of their bidding.
We should therefore hold fast to the truth of our history and not fall prey to those who seek to justify and maintain the PPP’s corrupt and abusive government in office. Indian Guyanese especially, who are targets of racial solicitations, should not allow themselves be swayed by these brazen attempts to perpetuate racial insecurity in our country.
Yours faithfully,
Craig Sylvester
