Dear Editor,
I observed that on June 9 the SN published a letter by Freddie Kissoon that dealt with Balram Singh Rai, and two days earlier Ralph Ramkarran also had Rai as his subject in his SN column. I write to offer my views on the ousting of Rai from the PPP by Cheddi and Janet Jagan.
I start by pointing out that Dr Baytoram Ramharack did in fact spend time interviewing Rai in London in the late 1990s when gathering material for his book, Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai. I also spoke with Rai twice in 1998. I have since read the Indelible Red Stain by Dr Mohan Raghbeer and I also met with Dr Ragbheer in 2014. Needless to say I have met with Dr Ramharack on many occasions. I have also read Dr Cheddi Jagan’s West on Trial, many, many times as a teenager.
Following the British removal of the PPP from office in 1953, and the split of the party in 1955 along ideological lines, with Forbes Burnham and the Indian intellectuals walking away from the communist hardliners led by Janet and Cheddi Jagan, the Jagans were persuaded by Indian business and financiers to tone down the Marxist rhetoric. Dr Jagan was a bit muted in his communist utterances until 1959 when Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba.
It was a euphoric moment for Dr Jagan. All the communist propaganda that he had been brainwashed with had come true. Communism had triumphed mere miles away from the USA. From that moment on Dr Jagan truly believed that the USA would have collapsed to world communism and that determined his thinking until the fall of communist Europe and the USSR in 1989. With Dr Jagan increasing his anti-USA and pro-USSR proclamations in 1960, an alarmed Indian business class supported the pro Hindu, pro-British, pro-capitalist, and pro-democracy Balram Singh Rai to be Chairman of the PPP.
Janet and Cheddi Jagan were vehemently opposed to their Marxist-Leninist party being chaired by Rai and at the 1962 Congress of the PPP they padded the delegates list with 100 names and personally actively campaigned against Rai with nasty slander. Brindley Benn, who was Rai’s opponent, was allowed to chair the voting session of the Congress. Yet when the votes were counted Rai lost by only one vote! Rai publicly exposed the rigging. Dr Jagan asked him to retract the statements and even offered Rai an increase in salary but Rai refused to be bribed and stuck to the truth. Dr Jagan eventually had Rai removed from the government as Home Affairs Minister.
Sacking Rai was another huge blunder by Dr Jagan. Rai was a British trained lawyer who had won the confidence of the Colonial Office. The British saw Rai as a man of integrity and moral values, a believer in the British system of governance, in Western democratic values, in capitalism, and a man of religion. They saw Rai as a counter-balance to the Jagans’ obsession with communism. So long as Rai was in the PPP and in the government the British were confident that Dr Jagan’s ideology would be checked. With the firing of Rai by Dr Jagan the British could not trust Jagan with independence and the USA was given the green light to remove the PPP from office.
So Dr Cheddi Jagan’s refusal to place the interest of his Indo-Guyanese supporters and that of all Guyanese above that of communism arising out of his entry into the Cold War on the side of the USSR, finally saw the USA fomenting social unrest to remove him from office.
Balram Singh Rai had formed the Justice Party (Moses Nagamooto had flirted with Rai’s JP before he settled in Jagan’s PPP) and contested the elections, but the social unrest had damaged race relations so badly that Indo and Afro-Guyanese became extremely politically polarized and they rallied around the PPP and the PNC out of fear of the other. In such a situation Balram Singh Rai stood no chance of winning votes in large numbers. Rai only won 4,000 odd votes. Interestingly, maybe Karma, in 2015 the PPP lost by 4,000 odd votes! (And Moses Nagamootoo is now PM).
In the aftermath of the 1964 elections the Jagans continued to engage in very nasty slander of Rai in order to discredit him in the Indian community. In the later 1960s Forbes Burnham on different occasions offered to make Rai a Senior Counsel, a judge, and Speaker of the House but he declined the overtures. Rai in 1970 emigrated to the UK and never returned to Guyana. He would later be denied a parliamentary pension by both PNC and PPP governments. Now that we have in President Granger a man of the same moral and religious values and integrity as Rai, maybe we will finally see Rai getting his pension, and at least the Order of Roraima.
Yours faithfully,
Malcolm Harripaul