Stuart Kaufman, speaking of extreme cases of ethnic violence, suggests that politicians can only stir up ethnic discontent if there is some historical experience to support their positions. According to his symbolic political theory of ethnic violence, ‘people respond to ethnic symbols and mobilize …. only if a widely known and accepted ethnic myth-symbol complex justifies hostility to the other group’ (Erin K Jenne (2007) Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment).
Guyana is a tinderbox of ethnic symbols around which claims about discrimination are consistently and easily made and there are always sufficient extant grounds for making such claims. For example, the present regime has been accused of militarizing the government and even Pastor Wendell Jeffrey (so far as I know no relation or acquaintance of mine), who usually comes over as a critical supporter of the regime, could state:
‘But there is indeed an increased number of aged, military, personnel who make up the current administration and have other key positions. The reason for this is simple. In a political age where trust is very scarce, the current administration is going with whom they know. They are also going with those who are loyal to them. So what is happening is that old military men and women are hiring their trusted friends, who happen to be old military men and women. …. And since most of the military personnel are African, most of the people being hired are African. When the PPP was in power, they practised something akin to this; most of the cabinet, ambassadors and highly placed officials in top positions were Indians. There was a time when all the Guyana ambassadors were only Indians. Political logic dictates that you go with whomever you are comfortable. I can almost assure you that if the PPP gets back into power, all of those military, African people will be replaced with Indians, many of whom will not be military.’ (There is no militarization of the government. SN 26/07/2016).
Whether or not the motivations were as pure as Pastor Jeffrey would have us believe, there can be little quarrel that at a practical level all of our different regimes have acted as he said and have had the opposition calling them out on this matter. In his column in this paper last Sunday, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran made this very point and all successful politicians in Guyana have been ethnic entrepreneurs. You can preach as much as you like: they will continue to do precisely what they have to do to gain votes to remain relevant or gain office.
Therefore, at one level, during his speech in New York a few weeks ago, former president Bharrat Jagdeo was doing nothing new with his claim that there is an assault by the present government on democracy, the people of Indian origin, the rural population and members of the PPP that is perhaps worse than what occurred under Forbes Burnham.
However, what should be borne in mind as we proceed is, in our context, the necessity to differentiate between this ‘normal’ action and accusations of racism and what took place under the PPP/C after Cheddi Jagan died and Janet Jagan was removed from office. In my view, the tendency to make a single continuum of the process of discrimination and accusations under the PPP/C does not do justice to an analysis of the subject.
Though from different perspectives what both Ralph and I find dangerous is essentially contained in the following utterance: ‘… we are going to work hard and whenever the elections come again, we are going to take back Guyana, we are going to take it back from these people…’
It appears to me that Ralph made a quite daring stretch when from the above statement he concluded that by “‘we are going to take back Guyana’, the former president ‘clearly meant, even if he did not say it, that ‘we’ will then rule Guyana in ‘our’ interests because it belongs to ‘us’. The big question is, who are ‘we? … What is new are his emotive appeals to ‘defend’ Indians ‘in these dark times’ and his promise to Indians to ‘take back Guyana’ for them. This is a wholly new dimension to the PPP’s agenda, namely, its formal and official transformation by Mr. Jagdeo into an ethnic party representing exclusively ethnic interests. Cheddi Jagan must be turning in his grave!’”
That aside, my concern is with Mr. Jagdeo’s claim that he and his party will soon again be in government. The PPP gets most of its electoral support from Indians and the indigenous peoples. As of the 2012 census, if you put all the Indian and Amerindian votes together, you have 50.3% of the population and all the Africans and mixed votes will result in 49.1%. Taken most broadly, these numbers do at least two things: they suggest that the case for a PPP return to government is not open and shut and that unless Mr. Jagdeo has totally lost his mind he must know that he cannot appeal only to Indians if his intent is to win a democratic vote!
The Jagdeo/Ramotar governments were easily the most undemocratic and ethnically divisive of all the PPP regimes we have had. By the time the PPP/C left government in 2015, the vast majority of Afro-Guyanese believed that the regime was racist and were disillusioned with government and democracy. An indication of this can maybe be gleaned from the fact that in 2014, only 28.5% of them claimed that they were satisfied with democracy in contrast to 48.1% of Indo-Guyanese, and only 19.7% of Africans thought that the regime cared about them, while 37.77% of Indians believed so. Further, evidence of the level of disillusion that existed even among the PPP’s traditional supporters can be easily discerned from the depth of the open ethnic mobilisation to which it had to resort in the heat of its struggle to retain power in 2015.
The PPP/C regime was not only politically/ethnically biased in the ‘normal’ manner but the Jagdeo/Ramotar governments’ deliberate effort to dominate the political space in Guyana added a new dimension to the process. Whether a government and/or its individual personnel are racists is important but not essential: in our ethnic context, the simplest form of political discrimination generally results in ethnic bias. The political dominance the PPP was attempting was resulting in ethnic dominance, and both are dangerous and amoral and did lead to massive alienation, corruption, underdevelopment and its resultant poverty. Is this what Mr. Jagdeo has in mind for us again if the PPP takes back the government? So far neither he nor his party has projected another modern vision!
