At the invitation of the Indian Action Committee, I attended a public symposium ‘Reflection on the life and works of Dr. Cheddi B. Jagan’ to celebrate his 100th birth anniversary. Such events are usually designed to lavish (often dubious) praise on the subject and this one was no exception. I would have been prepared to let it pass without comment had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Raymond Gaskin, who in his presentation claimed that, outside of political propaganda, our analysis of the contributions of our political leaders is usually too uncritical to be useful. I agreed with Mr. Gaskin for I believe that even when faults in such interpretation are unintended they obstruct the development and acceptance of an holistic picture of our past.
Among other criticisms, in his inimitable style Gaskin took aim at Cheddi Jagan’s creation of the Civic component in 1992. While some, including myself, viewed this as a necessary compromise for the PPP to broaden its ethnic base and win the acceptance of national and international capital, Gaskin appeared to view it as a betrayal of the PPP’s Marxist working class roots. By his account, it brought too many bourgeois, right wing persons into association with the party and this diluted its focus upon the working people. Gaskin is an avowed Marxist/Leninist, thus while his position is understandable, I remain uncertain as to whether he believes that the accommodation was necessary or whether he holds that, given its ethnic base, the PPP could have come to and remained productively in government without such a change. After all, even with the adjustments, the
