Dear Editor,
On the occasion of the 36th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney I would like to argue that the PPP was the main beneficiary of his death. In as much as Rodney was an obstacle to the PNC imposing the 1980 dictatorship constitution, he was also a very serious threat to the racial hegemony that the PPP enjoyed over Indian Guyanese who comprised the largest voting bloc by 1980. Dr Cheddi Jagan had since 1947 learned from Dr Jung Bahadur Singh that universal suffrage was inevitable and that whoever won the rural Indo-Guyanese votes would win any future elections.
That truism stuck in Dr Jagan’s head and he saw the rural vote as the means to gaining power in British Guiana to advance his communist cause. To this end the PPP and all its arms were organized solely for the purpose of making Indian Guyanese its base. The social unrest of the early 1960s, especially the Wismar violence of May 1964, served to concretise the Indo-Guyanese vote as a PPP base unchallenged by any other party or leader. That is until Walter Rodney started to ground with sugar workers in the late 1970s.
The late 1970s saw the African-Guyanese dominated government of Forbes Burnham come under severe pressure from Afro-Guyanese intellectuals who were concentrated in the Working Peoples’ Alliance led by Dr Walter Rodney, and who advocated multi-racial politics in the struggle to restore democracy to Guyana. While Dr Jagan and the PPP were reduced to holding small bottom house meetings in their strongholds, the WPA in general, and Dr Rodney in particular, held large public meetings in the sugar belt. Hundreds of Indian Guyanese would flock to Dr Rodney’s meetings. The PPP’s monopoly on Indo-Guyanese was under threat. In Georgetown the WPA drew huge multiracial crowds. Both the PPP and PNC’s racial politics was under siege.
If the WPA had gained power the PPP would have lost its support base and its visions of a communist Guyana would have disappeared. The PPP responded by ordering its groups and arms to actively dissuade Indo-Guyanese from participating in WPA activities. People were told not to attend WPA meetings. While the WPA was calling for the removal of the PNC from power the PPP, guided by Marxist dogma, gave critical support to the PNC and called for a National Front with that party. That position by the PPP caused it to lose much of its support base to the WPA. If Dr Rodney’s new culture of multiracial politics had succeeded, then the PPP would have dwindled away. The removal of Dr Rodney from the political scene came as a relief for the PPP.
I had cause to go to Freedom House on the morning of 14th June 1980 and I found the PPP tough men loitering outside elated that Dr Rodney had died. They boasted that he had blown himself up. Inside Freedom House the ‘Marxist intellectuals’ were labelling Dr Rodney an “adventurist.” It is a matter of public record that the PNC and PPP held secret power-sharing talks after Dr Rodney’s death. However Forbes Burnham died in 1985 and his successor Desmond Hoyte dismantled the socialist experiment and returned free and fair elections in 1992 affording the PPP the opportunity to finally replace the PNC in power. Of great significance is the fact that the PPP kept the 1980 constitution in place and it did not form a National Front government with the PNC. In power for 23 years it made no effort at national reconciliation and continued with racial politics. All of this was possible because Walter Rodney’s multiracial politics was killed in 1980.
Yours faithfully,
Malcolm Harripaul
