Dear Editor,
I read with great care and interest Mr Ralph Ramkarran’s letter which was published in Kaieteur News on Friday June 19, 2009, under the caption, ‘David Hinds and history.’ Mr Ramkarran raised a number of issues in his letter that should not stand unchallenged. I suspect that both David Hinds and Eusi Kwayana will address some of those issues. My concern in this letter is with one of the issues Mr Ramkarran addressed.
In his letter he accused Hinds of deception in his interpretation of Guyanese political history. For the benefit of the public I wish to state here and now that he is guilty of committing the same crime which he attempted to accuse Hinds of.
Mr Ramkarran, in an effort at painting a rosy picture of the PPP, claimed that after the PCD talks broke down, the PPP had proposed to the WPA a PPP/WPA alliance to contest the 1992 election. This is either a fiction of his imagination or a deliberate attempt on his part to deceive the populace at large. As one of the representatives of the WPA at the PCD discussions I challenge Mr Ramkarran or any of the other persons who participated in those discussions to prove me wrong. It never happened. In his attempt to embellish the image of his party Ramkarran wrote, “The PPP then decided to file its own candidate and list. Notwithstanding the PPP invited Professor Clive Thomas to be Cheddi Jagan’s running mate…” To be generous to Mr Ramkarran he seems to have got his timelines mixed up or was misled by his comrades who dealt with the PCD discussions. Because he was not involved in those discussions he was and is not in a position to speak with any degree of certainty on what took place.
I wish to point out for the benefit of both Mr Ramkarran and the public what actually took place. The Jagan/Thomas ticket was first raised in the PCD deliberations before the talks deadlocked and during the period of trying to break the deadlock. After the talks collapsed the PPP then moved to Mr Sam Hinds and the Civic elements. The rest is history. It is public knowledge that after the PPP/C victory Dr Jagan made an offer to Dr Clive Thomas to join his government.
I hope that Mr Ralph Ramkarran who is a contender to be his party‘s presidential candidate in the 2011 elections will demonstrate political maturity by publicly correcting his falsification of an important development in this country’s political history. His failure to do so when added to his position that the PPP did not contribute to the negative racial relations and politics in the country could only be interpreted to mean that he is no different from his comrades in Freedom House. This will be bad for the country’s future.
Yours faithfully,
Tacuma Ogunseye
