Dear Editor,
I refer to Mr Eusi Kwayana’s letter titled ‘The phrase “elected dictatorship” was used in relation to the government’s veto of 39 EU micro-funded projects not their delay.’ (SN, July 22). Mr Kwayana wrote: “…it seems Mr Dev and a person whose name I do not know were in some exchange. I have seen Mr Dev’s column, ‘Elected dictatorship’ in Kaieteur News (July 13)….” Mr. Kwayana further went on: “I have not seen the exchange between him and the other person he described in his July 13 column.”
Mr Kwayana, not reading the consistent argument between me and Mr Dev over the past five months, would not know that in his July 13 article, I was the other person. Mr Dev merely referred to me as “the professor.” I would like to bring to his attention my perspective on Dev because I believe Mr Dev’s attack on my theory of ‘elected dictatorship’ is not motivated by intellectual exchange but stems from an opportunistic change of political direction. Before I begin my argument let me say most definitively that I have lost all intellectual and political respect for Ravi Dev.
The political value he embodied which caused him to be a special invitee at the Ronald Waddell funeral, he has deliberately squandered.
There are two threads to the new activism of Mr Dev. One is his convenient use of political theory. The other is his descent into opportunism to justify his transformation. Let us look at the first one first. No theoretical formulation that can be found for the description of the Jagdeo presidency being a dictatorship finds comfort with Dev. He comes up with a theory of dictatorship by Karl Friedrich that he says is the standard test.
He finds it is only relevant to the Forbes Burnham regime. When you tell him the PPP government is an autocracy, he replies by letting you know that the areas of the abominating rule that you see in Jagdeo can be found in most democracies. I replied to Mr Dev and showed him that Friedrich cannot be applied to Burnham. The PPP enjoyed immense freedom under Burnham to the point where in 1985, Burnham and Jagan agreed to merge. I never heard back from him on that point.
Mr Dev found time to type a number of letters and columns accusing me of writing essays that can lead to violent attacks on the state, especially since the violence is, according to him, ongoing. But he has not seen it as relevant to date to comment on some very dangerous and egregious policies of Mr Jagdeo that play into the hands of the very people that Dev thinks will be incited by my writings.
Mr Dev used the plural, yet to date he refuses to name the articles. He cannot do so because it would open him up to public ridicule. So what he does is that he sticks to a generalization – my term of elected dictatorship.
Mr Dev glosses over some manifestations of Mr Jagdeo’s dictatorial exercise of power, which for him are neither here or there. From all his writings of late, it seems that Mr Dev has returned to the only cocoon he knows – ethnic protection. Since the violence of the insurgency, particularly the mini-genocide at Lusignan, Mr Dev has taken the position that the PPP government should be protected at all costs because to criticize it will bring attacks on East Indians. Mr Dev knows nothing about the nature of the PPP. The more succour, protection, support, comfort, you give Mr Jagdeo’s presidency, the less inclusive Mr Jagdeo becomes, the more authoritarian the Office of the President gets.
That does not seem to bother Mr Dev because the overriding consideration is not elected dictatorship but protection of East Indians. It is such a pity that Mr Dev doesn’t seem to understand that he is digging a hole to fill a hole.
We rally around the President and his government, and we wake up the next morning to find that the insurgency is given new life because the well-supported government, infatuated with the embrace of all the stakeholders, thinks it can act more heavy-handedly.
This is the type of power usage that has brought us to this dangerous level. It seems that Mr Dev has made up his mind as to where his politics is going. I have made up my mind a long time ago that we have in Guyana, an elected dictatorship.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
