Dear Editor,
I refer to Swami Aksharananda’s letter of May 1, 2015 in SN (`We are being told that when Africans vote for the PNC they are asserting ethnic pride but when Indians vote for the PPP it is racism’). I am convinced by this second letter of Aksharananda that he has taken up where Ravi Dev left off. He has taken the mantle of his Indian supremacist mentor Ravi Dev in which Guyanese history is vulgarly distorted to suit an ethnic agenda and to maintain PPP hegemony over this country
I read this man’s letter and there is absolutely nothing scholarly redeeming about his historical and political descriptions. His arguments are so scheming that my best assessment would be dangerous propaganda.
What follows is a point by point rejection of the main contentions in Aksharananda’s polemic. First, he asserts that Africans voted for race loyalty in 1992 elections. There is no mention of the phenomenon in the form of Desmond Hoyte. In post-colonial politics, Desmond Hoyte has broken the tradition of authoritarian politics
African Guyanese voted for Hoyte because they wanted to give him a chance to deepen the process of glasnost and perestroika only matched in world politics at the time by Mikhail Gorbachev. What Hoyte did was extraordinary in the history of post-colonial politics and he deserved to have been elected in 1992. I did not vote for him because I believed that the WPA should have been in government. African Guyanese voted for Hoyte’s policies but Aksharananda sees race in every aspect of Guyanese politics
Secondly, Aksharananda posits that Indians voted race too but because of that they have been denounced. There were admirable philosophical reasons for Africans to vote for Hoyte in 1992 than Indians for the PPP in 2011. By 2011, the post-Jagan PPP had become a Machiavellian house of kleptocracy and oligarchic intentions. If Indians wanted to vote race and keep the PNC out in 2011 then they had a wonderful redeeming opportunity in the form of the Alliance For Change. They stuck with the PPP and that was a primitive choice that deserves intellectual condemnation
Thirdly, Aksharananda is wrong. Africans do not vote race at all times. Aksharananda knows what happened in 2006 but that phenomenon will muddy his racist demagoguery so he ignores it. African Guyanese gave the AFC five seats in 2006. These ballots could not have been exclusively for Raphael Trotman because the AFC was not an African party, Trotman as an African didn’t have control over the AFC as with the leader of the PNC and PPP
Fourthly, African Guyanese have shown a deep moral revulsion to authoritarian rule in Guyana that Indian people have refused to emulate. The African-dominated Burnham regime was literally vanquished through the open and bold defection of the African middle classes, the African rural peasantry and sections of the urban African proletariat particularly the army. The era of WPA activities and the WPA weakening of the Burnham regime is a permanent mountain standing between the Indian supremacist propaganda of Ravi Dev and Aksharananda. It vitiates every day the efforts of people like Dev and Indian racists in the diaspora to see Guyanese history as a permanent embrace of Africans for the PNC and Indians for the PPP. My feeling after witnessing 24 meetings of the coalition’s 2015 campaign is that Indians are beginning to wake up
Fifthly, Aksharananda is bordering on wickedness and maliciousness to equate criticism of Indian support for the PPP with Indians having pride in their culture. The two are not related in any conceivable way. The two great examples are Yesu Persaud and Eusi Kwayana. Yesu Persaud is a brilliant devotee of Hindu culture and as a Hindu has created Indian institutions in Guyana. But he is not a PPP supporter and is a formidable critic of PPP authoritarianism
Eusi Kwayana is a staunch advocate of African culture in Guyana but he has been a tireless activist against the PNC government which was an African dominated administration. The point is you can be a fanatical devotee of ethnic culture but it should not blind you to the destruction of your country by people who belong to your ethnic culture. Apparently it has done so to Aksharananda
The open, barefaced message to Indians that because they voted for the PPP, their critics want to deny them their right to the practice their tradition, culture and religion and be proud of being Hindu and Indian is the only means people like Dev, Aksharananda and the PPP have of retaining the Indian vote, that is why after long years of silence since the death of ROAR, Aksharananda has finally shown his true colours.
It will not work. Young Indians are disgusted with an Indian party with corrupt members who have demolished their country. They are going to go into that ballot station and vote against the PPP then go into their temples and mosques and pray. People like Aksharananda and Bharrat Jagdeo belong to the distant past
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
