A friend of mine told me that I was out of touch with the national mood: ‘people voted and they want to know who won’. I had to agree that such might well be the general mood, but I refuse to accept that it necessarily should be mine. I believe that it would be a great pity and a fundamental error if the current crisis is again allowed to fester without our being able to extract from it concessions that will lead to a major overhaul of the way this country is governed.
Crises usually provide some of the best opportunities for finding solutions to entrenched problems and we have lost good ones. Eusi Kwayana and Moses Bhagwan recently reminded us that following the breakdown of constitutional talks in London in the early 1960s a co-leadership proposal similar to the one that at present exists in Northern Ireland and that former president Bill Clinton referred to as ‘a work of genius that’s applicable if you care at all about preserving democracy’ was placed on the table; was accepted by Forbes Burnham but rejected by the PPP (SN: 10/03/2020). By the end of that crisis Jagan himself reported in his West on Trial: ‘The toll for the 1964 disturbances was very heavy. About 2,668 families involving approximately 15,000 persons were forced to move their houses and settle in communities of their own ethnic group. The large majority were Indians. Over 1,400 homes were destroyed by fire. A total of 176 people were killed and 920 injured.’