Dear Editor,
I write with reference to Moses Bhagwan’s “Stop this hypocrisy about charging people for racial incitement” (Stabroek News, 2/4/2023). While I hold Mr. Bhagwan in high regard, I cannot do the same for his arguments. Those arguments cannot be sustained by any thoughtful consideration in history, contemporary empirics around electoral behaviour, political or sociological theory, or ethics. On the contrary, rather than making a contribution in the right direction, Mr. Bhagwan opted to descend into an amalgam of unforgivable distortions. Allow me to develop these points.
Let us first recap the three core arguments of Mr. Bhagwan. They are (1) that Guyana’s principal problem is that it is fundamentally divided along racial lines; (2) that this supposed divide informs all political attitudes and behaviour; and (3) that the recent record of racial incitement by the WPA and PNC should be tolerated. This last point is expressed in Mr. Bhagwan’s defense of Tacuma Ogunseye recent racialized provocations.
Modern epistemology is clear that facts alone cannot refute theory. This is a critical point because all too often people keep insisting on “showing the evidence.” Against this naivety, we should know that only theory can refute theory. Bhagwan’s first argument that race is the fulcrum of identity in the country is a theoretical argument. I counter this by positing that Guyana’s historic problem is that the country is divided between authoritarian social forces (PNC and WPA) on the one hand, versus the democratic thrust (PPP/C) of the country since 1992. Put simply, it is not race that anchors our political divisions. Rather it is that the PNC, followed by the WPA, are bent on a politics of slow subversion of state institutions, as against the PPP/C’s efforts at building a politics of democratic engagement.
As for electoral behaviour Mr. Bhagwan is shockingly oblivious to the available data at least since 1997. Note that Janet Jagan won 55.26% of the vote in the December 1997 polls, and despite a sustained campaign by the news media against the PPP/C, the party under Jagdeo received 54.67%, against the PNC/R’s 34.07% in 2006. But more importantly, is that the PPP/C lost the National Assembly in 2011, and was defeated at the polls in 2015, but won fairly in 2020. We have a fluid political situation that can no longer be explained by race.
Two things in the 2020 elections are worth specific consideration in the analysis of voting trends. First, the APNU-AFC were competitive and this despite the fact that Afro-Guyanese make up only 29% of the population. Elections results are now so close (2011, 2015, and 2020) that, again, race cannot explain things. The other issue of 2020 gets back to my central argument, namely that political identity cannot be directly derived from race in its nominal form, and that the PNC/R backed up by the WPA are stuck in an authoritarian mindset.
Still on Bhagwan’s second argument, I follow numerous thinkers who believe that identity is something overdetermined. This means that one’s identity cannot be derived from, or reduced to, a single source, or rest on a fixed, central axis. Writers including Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Rex Nettleford, among others, have all come to the same conclusion. Bhagwan’s idea that race is all that anchors political identity is wrong. Rather, it is the fluidity of identity dynamics that has underwritten political developments in Guyana.
Mr. Bhagwan needs to come up to speed with modern sociological and political theory, but mostly importantly, with the structural reconfiguration of race, culture, identity, and the political in Guyana. This is not the Guyana of the mid to late 20th century. Younger people have been breaking out of ‘race,’ confinement that Frantz Fanon once labeled as a ‘bastard principle’. Regrettably, it appears that Mr. Bhagwan, like Tacuma Ogunseye wants to hold on to that same ‘bastard principle’, and to boot, to weaponize it further.
Finally, Mr. Bhagwan left here some time ago, and he can therefore live comfortably with Ogunseye’s call of racial violence, and a race-inspired subversion of the state. In which country in the world is that not a violation etched in criminal incitement? I invite Moses Bhagwan to spare no effort at withdrawing his inadvertent but still potent support for racial incitement in Guyana. Tentanda Via – the way must be tried.
Sincerely,
Dr. Randolph Persaud
