Dear Editor,
Mr Ralph Ramkarran’s reply to my letter addressing his implicit suggestion that the PNC should apologize to the Guyanese people and that the PPP has nothing to apologize for has drawn responses from Tacuma Ogunseye, Abu Bakr, Freddie Kissoon and Eusi Kwayana. It has also generated a lot of discussion on Stabroek News’ discussion board. In my humble opinion this is ample testimony of the importance of this discussion to the wider national discourse. In this regard Mr Ramkarran’s suggestion that readers are bored with the discussion may be an underestimation of the capacity of the Guyanese people to appreciate a discussion/debate on our recent political history. It is, therefore, regrettable that he has decided to end his participation in a discussion that was prompted by his initial intervention.
I find Mr Ramkarran’s last letter (‘The debate is about facts within living memory,’ SN June 27) very revealing for a number of reasons. But one thing stands out. Mr Ramkarran admits that he was ignorant of and mistaken about some of the facts Mr Kwayana revealed in his letter. This was my impression when I first read Mr Ramkarran’s response to my initial letter. He seems, to have relied almost exclusively on one source or set of sources. I suspect that Dr Jagan’s The West on Trial was a chief source. My own attitude to The West on Trial changed after I read Mr Kwayana’s unpublished Footnotes to the West on Trial, which led me to some primary sources including Dr Jagan’s 1956 Congress paper and Mr Kwayana’s response which were both published by the University of Puerto Rico. I concluded that The West on Trial fitted into a PPP’s narrative and therefore it omits, downplays or puts a narrow partisan spin on some of the events. This has resulted in a huge gap in most of the other published materials on the political history of Guyana that relied exclusively on it, especially as it relates to the 1953-64 period. It is against this background that the second split in 1956-57 becomes important. I was first alerted to this by Dr Rupert Roopnaraine.
Dr Jagan’s 1956 Congress paper is very important. Yet it does not get a lot of treatment in The West on Trial. In this paper Dr Jagan take great pains to point out how reactionary the Portuguese commercial class and the African Civil Service were He divides the African community into different groups – the racialist LCP types, the reactionary civil service, etc. But when it came to Indians they were portrayed as a single bloc. The Indian commercial class was described as patriotic. On the other hand the so-called ultra left was severely criticized and implicitly blamed for the suspension of the constitution. If there was a blueprint for the PPP’s abandonment of ethnic unity as the central plank of its being it is this paper. Despite its later embrace of Marxist fundamentalism the consequences of this race-based line of march haunts the PPP to this day.
It is not surprising then that Mr Ramkarran finds that I was using “anecdotal” and “warped” history and a “patchwork of obscure and unknown events.” The history to which I referred was either left out entirely from or glossed over by The West on Trial. It’s a history the PPP understandably wants to downplay or erase. It does not fit into the narrative of victimhood and innocence. I see part of my job as a public commentator to retrieve from the ‘woodwork’ of history those aspects that have been wittingly and unwittingly “obscured and unknowned.” The obscure and the unknown are important in Guyana’s case. As Abu Bakr points out, in ethnically divided societies political-ethnic narratives become the substitute for collective history. In the process events which do not fit into the narratives are obscured, buried or revised. Part of the job of the political historian is to retrieve this buried history.
Here is where Kwayana becomes central to where I am going. He and his contributions have unfortunately been obscured by both ethnic narratives largely because he has represented a disturbing presence and an unnerving independence of thought and action that do not fit well into set narratives. Since academics have generally relied on these narratives his role has not been adequately treated in that arena either. But as is revealed by his priceless letter (SN June 26) a significant chunk of Guyana’s political history and by extension an important aspect of its political culture have been obscured with him.
In a small way I and a few others are attempting to correct that, not to elevate Kwayana as some may be quick to conclude, but to broaden the understanding of our politics and society. This is less about Kwayana the person, who like all the political people of his generation made some mis-steps, but about the sum total of his praxis and how that fits into the architecture of Guyana’s political history and culture. Kwayana has played decisive roles in the three of the four defining movements in recent Guyanese politics – the Independence, pan-African and pro-democracy movements. Although he was not a central figure in the fourth movement – pan-Indian movement – he did participate in the early period. Further, he is the only political person in the anglophone Caribbean who has had a profound impact on national politics for a prolonged period from outside of the formal governmental structures. To ignore such interventions is to be ahistorical at best.
What Kwayana’s interventions represent, from my standpoint, then, is the independent strand in our political evolution which has been blurred by the ready acceptance of a PPP/Jagan-PNC/Burnham duality of good and evil. This independent strand can be traced back to Kwayana’s support of Jagan in 1947 against the wishes of many in African Guyanese political leadership of the time. It took organizational form with the formation of ASCRIA, which represented a Black Nationalism that was independent of the African Guyanese political establishment even when it supported the government. The formation of the WPA in 1974 took that independence to another level. The WPA’s politics of “critical exposure” as an alternative to “critical support” and its fierce opposition to the PNC’s dictatorial rule despite the government’s “progressive” foreign policy is located in this independent tradition. This is the tradition that made Walter Rodney possible and which he in turn enriched. Rodney’s “good relations” with the PPP was not a function of the innocence of the PPP. Rather it arose from Rodney’s broad political culture and his sensitivity to the ethnic dynamics.
I write the above to provide the backdrop for my seemingly uncomfortable conclusion about the PPP’s role in frustrating ethnic unity in Guyana since the 1950s. I arrived at this conclusion after examining the entire PPP score sheet, including the National Patriotic Front proposal in the 1970s and the offer of a joint slate with Dr Thomas in the 1990s. My omission of these two proposals from my letter unfortunately gave Mr Ramkarran the impression that I was trying to “duck” them. Nothing is further from the truth. Mr Ramkarran conveniently forgets that in a previous letter the week before I had chided him for omitting the National Patriotic Front proposal from his article on power sharing. Am I to conclude that he was being “alarmingly shallow and downright deceptive” and that his analysis was “flawed” and “unacceptable for a man of his stature”?
I had set out a thesis that argued that at crucial points in recent history when openings for ethnic reconciliation presented themselves the PPP has in every case turned its back. Mr Ramkarran wonders whether I considered the two instances he queries to be “unimportant or did not contradict his conclusions.” The answer is yes. As I hinted, and perhaps should have said so more explicitly, the PPP only gets serious about national reconciliation when it is out of power or in trouble.
It is worth remembering that the National Patriotic Front proposal arose from the PPP’s “critical support” policy which was driven by the dictates of the international communist movement. The announcement of critical support came shortly after a meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean communist parties held in Havana, Cuba in March 1975. At this meeting a decision was taken by the parties present to support Third World governments which, though not socialist in character, were willing to take anti-imperialist positions. This position was in keeping with the Soviet Union’s non-capitalist path which held in part that since “the petit bourgeoisie usually dominates the state machinery and political life, and since they hold an objectively intermediate position, they are able to orient the state and the politics in a progressive direction.” My conclusion then is that though the NPF had the appearance of national reconciliation, it was not grounded in a desire to heal ethnic wounds but in ideological realpolitik.
Mr Ramkarran makes heavy weather of the PCD offer to share the top ticket with the WPA. I do not consider, perhaps wrongly, the Jagan-Thomas proposal as an example of national reconciliation. Important though it is, it was part of a series of proposals for the top of the PCD ticket. The PPP already smelled victory and was not entertaining any joint state without a PPP member at the top. I don’t think that represents a hand of reconciliation. As was the case with the NPF proposal the PPP was driven less by ethnic reconciliation and more by ethno-political positioning.
What is interesting is that while the PPP was offering the Jagan-Thomas ticket it was simultaneously rejecting a PNC-PPP-WPA interim government for the period 1990-1992. Both the WPA and PNC had signalled their willingness to participate in such a government. How could you talk of national reconciliation without the PNC which had consented to free and fair elections? This is my thesis about the PPP. It wanted the PNC in a national government when it [the PPP] was in opposition even during the worst days of the dictatorship. Now that it is smelling power, it no longer wants the PNC. Ironically it seems that Burnham understood this trait in the PPP. To paraphrase Mr Ramkarran I wonder what such a PPP-PNC-WPA government “would have meant for the future of Guyana”?
Another question is why, if the PPP were so serious about a PPP-WPA alliance, did it not pursue such an alliance after it won the election. A fact that the PPP never talks about is the WPA’s help in giving the PPP a working majority in parliament. Let’s accept for a moment the PPP’s view that the WPA’s initial objection to Dr Jagan at the top of the ticket on the basis that he was not a symbol of ethnic-national unity was unreasonable. Now that Dr Jagan is the elected President that is no longer an issue. Why not, in the name of the national reconciliation you claim you are serious about, approach the WPA about joining the government. Why do you instead want Dr Thomas as a minister and not the WPA as a coalition partner?
I want to end with a few observations. First, I am glad Mr Ramkarran corrects his earlier impression that I subscribe to or perpetuate ethnic narratives. Second, it is unfortunate that Mr Ramkarran finds my critique of the PPP to be a “tirade” full of “polemical bile.” Mrs. Jagan had also on more than one occasion called me a “PPP hater.” She and Dr Jagan both refused to grant me interviews for my PhD dissertation after they had previously agreed. This reversal came after I had an exchange with Mrs Jagan in the New York based Caribbean Daylight in 1993 over the omission of Mr Kwayana from the official history of the PPP which she claimed she had written. I wonder how come the writings of this ‘PPP hater’ were used by the PPP only a few years ago during the Buxton siege to pronounce on the PNC’s presumed guilt.
Third, to suggest that Mr Kwayana’s letter was full of sarcasm, ‘spice’ and bitterness is part of the larger obscuring, which Mr Ramkarran should not get away with. If you successfully frame someone or his/her views as arising from bitterness, as Mr Ramkarran does, then it becomes easy to dismiss and obscure them. This is what the PPP has continuously tried to do with and to Kwayana since 1957. If Mr Ramkarran knows of something Mr Kwayana should be bitter about then he should reveal it.
Fourth, Mr Ramkarran says on two occasions that I called on the PPP to apologize. That’s an inference that is not correct. I was/am saying that the PPP must be careful about asking others to apologize because it also made costly mistakes. I have stayed away from the apology debate precisely because in a situation of ethnic competition an apology from one side will most likely be used by the other side as justification for continued ethnic inflexibility. This does not mean that I am opposed to acknowledgements of indiscretions by both the PNC and the PPP. Finally, Guyanese deserve to be exposed to a broad discourse of our politics and political history that goes beyond partisan/ethnic narratives. This I am committed to however uncomfortable it may be for some political leaders.
Yours faithfully,
David Hinds
