Former PPP luminary Ralph Ramkarran has dared the party to place on the agenda of its upcoming congress whether to go it alone or work with the opposition and he also lifted the veil on centrally-directed machinations that have led to people like him being marginalized and knocked down during internal voting.
In his column which is to appear in tomorrow’s Sunday Stabroek, Ramkarran said that the party’s twice-postponed 30th Congress needs to face frontally the issues that have led to its worst crisis in 20 years. He also declared that the Congress will have to excise the growing cancer of persons in the leadership of the party scheming against other leaders or the electorate will deal a blow to the party “from which it will take years to recover, if at all”.
Ramkarran who quit the party in his 50th year of membership in a row over what he said was serious corruption in the country, said that the party does not need a congress with a superficial show of unity, festering discontent and a collapsed organizational infrastructure beneath the surface.
“It needs a Congress which smells the coffee, sheds the Party’s negative images, democratizes, tackles corruption, renews its commitment to and restores the pride and inspiration of its members in its great mission of liberation and social justice, involves them in developing the policies of the Party and gives them free rein to frankly and freely discuss and debate where the Party went wrong in 2011, and the options of whether the Party should go forward alone or together with the opposition”, he declared.
Ramkarran dared the leadership to place on the agenda of the congress set for August2-4 at Corentyne whether to go forward alone or together with the opposition and said the party should allow a full, free and balanced debate and then submit the question to a secret ballot.
Without calling names, he also addressed what he saw as a centrally directed campaign by some PPP leaders against him. These moves, he said, started at the August 2008 Congress which had been a critical forum in signalling who would be the next presidential candidate. Ramkarran’s subsequent bid to be the party’s presidential candidate floundered within the party at a key meeting which paved the way for General Secretary Donald Ramotar to be anointed as the presidential candidate. Ramkarran, a former two-term Speaker of the National Assembly, said that the machinations continued against him after the 2011 general elections as a means of excluding him from consideration for inclusion in the Cabinet.
“The centrally directed campaigns against me at the Congress for the CC (Central Committee) and afterwards for the Executive Committee were fiercely negative and vulgar. It was the worst since that against Balram Singh Rai in the 1960s. Its objective was not merely to let the membership know that I would not be favoured as the presidential candidate but to publicly deliver a heavy dose of humiliation and demoralization. Long before the Congress there were clear indications consciously given that I would not be the candidate”, Ramkarran wrote
