Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo has accused the PPP of excluding him while he was a member of the party because he did not conform to what he said was its pro-Hindi and communist ideologies.
Speaking at the opening of the Alliance for Change (AFC) Headquarters two Saturdays ago he reminisced on his experiences while a member of the PPP. After being a longstanding member of the party he parted ways in 2011 and later joined forces with the AFC.
He told the gathering that the party saw him as the “defaulter’s friend” when he started to defend AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan who had been expelled from the party years earlier.
“The efforts however failed and perhaps history would remember that that failure was to lead and open the door to the success we see not for an individual but for all our people”, he said. He said that the effort to keep Ramjattan in the PPP maybe was doomed to fail because “if he had stayed perhaps he would have been part and parcel of the rot in which I had to endure for a few more years”.
Nagamootoo recalled that after Ramjattan’s expulsion he was constantly being reminded at meetings for taking the similar position, some of which were later taken by Ralph Ramkarran against corruption, calling for the establishment of the Public Procurement Commission, calling for an investigation into death squads and investigations into the PPP leadership. He recalled that these were things which constantly provoked a response “leh we give he de Khemraj treatment”.
Nagamootoo said that after the formation of the AFC he was asked whether he was going that route, nothing that after the expulsion of Ramjattan “nothing was the same”.
He said that many did not know that he suffered “major disqualifications.” Among them was that he never studied in the then Soviet Union and his refusal to be indoctrinated into the Communist party of the Soviet Union. He said that another had to do with the pro-Hindu stance of the PPP.
“It had always been thought that the PPP was some type of pro-Hindu party and when it was discovered that I was a Christian, I suffered disqualification that I lived with for many, many years,” he said.
He spoke of having to fight “an internal racism and living with it and still determined that there was a role I had to play in the interest of the people of Guyana.” According to Nagamootoo in 2011 when he parted ways with the PPP, “it was not so much that I was fed up with the old but because I thought it was about time to join the new and the Alliance for Change was that new force.”
Carlyle Goring
Albert Cromwell
