By Clem Seecharan
Emeritus Professor of History
London Metropolitan University
This is abridged from my introductory essay to a biography of Rai by Baytoram Ramharack, Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai and the Politics of British Guiana (Trinidad: Chakra, 2005).
Editor’s Note: In the last two weeks, we have lost several Guyanese who have made significant contributions to political, economic and cultural life. This week’s column pays homage to one of them, and is dedicated also to the memory of Ron Bobb-Semple and Yesu Persaud.
Balram Singh Rai (1921-2022), a minister in Cheddi Jagan’s government from 1959 until he was expelled from the PPP in June 1962, died in Oxford, England earlier this month. He migrated to England in 1970, and had taken no perceptible part in Guyanese politics since his Justice Party was comprehensively defeated in the first general elections under PR, in December 1964. It is arguable that he was demoralised by the scale of his defeat, and that he became something of a recluse thereafter. He was a tremendous loss to Guyana’s political culture. I will attempt a survey of what inspired his brief political career, his philosophical promptings.
As leader of the short-lived Justice Party in 1964, Rai was unapologetic for his espousal of the political cause of Indo-Guyanese. Yet it was an endeavour that recognised the multi-racial composition of Guyana, while disavowing claims that Marxism could eradicate deep-seated ethnic insecurity and chronic mutual suspicion. Rai’s politics was premised on Guyana’s Indian and African identities, with discrete cultural underpinnings hardened by the scramble for the political spoils and puny economic harvests, in a capricious natural environment. His politics was about the shaping of the nuts and bolts of a modus vivendi.
A resurgent political culture, therefore, must be animated by a resolve to lessen racial insecurity while establishing a political framework that empowers both major segments. Winner cannot take all in Guyana’s electoral exercises, however free and fair and free from fear they may be, for they are essentially racial censuses. A constitution framed conspicuously to minimise the prevailing sentiment of political exclusion must be accompanied by the pursuit of an imaginative education programme that promotes African, Indian and Indigenous cultural security at all levels of society.
Rai’s legacy may be framed thus: no ideological purity, however zealously pursued, will erase racial insecurity with its potential for instability and violence. Only the studied cultivation of existing cultural diversity, along with constitutional guarantees of inclusiveness, could engender long-term prosperity and a sense of nationhood. As Rai wrote in the foreword to his Justice Party manifesto of October 1964, the recent manifestations of Guyanese racial savagery demanded that the multiracial and multicultural character of the country be recognised as paramount. To deny that diversity − and the absence of a sense of nationhood − would bottle up potentially lethal animosity.
Rai agonised over the racial violence, between 1962 and 1964: ‘I have watched with increasing sadness and agony the disastrous events which have befallen our country and our people, more especially the working-class people − of all races. I have witnessed assaults, woundings, death and destruction, helpless to avert such incidents or to stem the swelling tide. I have seen the life’s efforts and savings of whole families go up in flames, the hurried dismantling of houses and their attempted re-erection in mud and water; hundreds of people hauled before the Courts, thousands of peaceful, innocent people rendered homeless and made refugees in their own homeland. I have seen people with their few, humble belongings fleeing for their lives and their children’s lives and I have attended the cremation and burial of many of our unfortunate ones. On a personal note, I have had to remove my aged father from the home and village [Beterverwagting, East Coast Demerara] in which I was born 43 years ago [on 8 February 1921], and his home is now deserted and abandoned.’
Rai repudiated Marxism’s capacity to eradicate ‘false consciousness’, such as identity on the basis of race. He also rejected the view of those who embraced Marxism as a superior instrument of economic development. Although Rai was deeply involved (along with Eusi Kwayana) in Jagan’s first legislative campaign in 1947, he contested the 1953 elections for the anti-communist National Democratic Party. He was an unsuccessful candidate. But Rai remained unconvinced by Jagan’s unfaltering faith in Marxism even when he was a minister in his government, between 1959 and 1962.
He sought to mollify Jagan’s obduracy concerning a potentially path-breaking deal between Booker and his Government that might have established a benchmark for partnership with foreign capital, while enhancing his political credibility at a crucial time. But Rai’s counsel could not lessen Jagan’s visceral aversion to private capital, as Dr Ramharack observes: ‘Sir Jock Campbell, Chairman of Booker, had hosted Jagan, Rai and Brindley Benn at a dinner, at the Travellers Club, during the 1960 Constitutional Conference in London. Although Campbell was opposed to Jagan’s extensive nationalisation plan, he made an informal offer to Jagan in which he agreed to make over 49% or 51% of the sugar estates to the government, to be paid out of profits in ensuing years. Rai urged Jagan to consider the plan because he felt it was a good deal rather than pursuing his nationalisation scheme. Jagan, however, refused to consider the plan, and he left at the end of the Conference for Castro’s Cuba. Jagan’s refusal to consider the Campbell offer regarding the sugar industry, despite Rai’s urgings, was no doubt clouded by his Marxist ideology.’
Dr. Fenton Ramsahoye (the Attorney-General, 1961-64) offered the following explanation for why Jagan (Burnham, too) had no appetite for private enterprise: ‘He had a misunderstanding of how wealth and employment were created. He felt that the best opportunities for the realisation of these were through a Marxist approach to development…That was a fundamental flaw in his political thinking − that managerial skills and risk-taking were irrelevant; that state ownership would achieve everything; entrepreneurial skills were not necessary. Guyana’s two main leaders had a basic antipathy to private enterprise − the private creation of wealth and employment. Other countries in the Caribbean retained their businessmen, bankers and entrepreneurs after Independence: people with skills. That set the others apart from Guyana’.
As late as the early 1980s, Cheddi Jagan continued to inveigh against the ‘tactic of partnership’ devised by the ‘imperialists’ to exploit the Caribbean and Latin America: ‘In pursuit of its objective of maintaining the dependency status of these territories through penetration as distinct from domination, imperialism has resorted to incorporate nationals and even governments as share-holding partners, even to the extent of 51% ownership. This new manoeuvre of joint venture was aimed at creating a wider social base for capitalism-imperialism for the defence of foreign rather than national interest’.
But Rai was never enamoured of Jagan’s panacea, his Marxist creed. In 1964, in his Justice Party manifesto, his rejection of communism and belief in private enterprise, including joint ventures between foreign and local capital, were clearly enunciated: ‘The Justice Party advocates the establishment of a WELFARE STATE − a state in which the poor are protected and the strong are just. It is irrevocably opposed to Communism. It is opposed to State control of all economic activity. It is opposed to the ownership by the State of all means of production, distribution and exchange. It is opposed to the confiscation and expropriation of private property − local or foreign. On the contrary, it will encourage and guarantee the ownership of private property, but it will promote welfare schemes and welfare legislation to promote and safeguard the welfare of workers. The Party is of the view that underdeveloped countries can be most quickly and effectively developed by private enterprise, both local and foreign, acting under the supervision of and in participation with the Government’.
Rai was a devout Hindu, an Arya Samajist, the reformist Hindu movement based on the teachings of Swami Dayananda (1824-83), the 19th century Gujarati nationalist who sought to cleanse Hinduism of some of its more unsavoury excrescences — sati or the immolation of widows, caste prejudice, ritual excesses, child marriages, prohibition against widow remarriage (including child widows), sacerdotal monopoly by Brahmins. The bedrock of his reform mission was the reclamation of textual authenticity: a return to the source, the Vedas. By rejecting Brahminism, so crucial to Caribbean Hinduism, the Arya Samaj had kindled a subversive spirit among some Indians in the region. It is arguable, therefore, that the germ of Rai’s opposition to Jagan’s Marxism and his monopoly of Indian leadership stemmed from his immersion in the Arya Samajist creed that was inclined to see Cheddi’s politics, though reformist, as Brahminical in its dogmas and inflexibility. It was imprisoned by a received creed.
Rai articulated the source of his own politics thus: ‘[I]t is my firm conviction that there can be no good government until statesmen and kings are imbued with religion and philosophy. Swami Dayananda’s contribution to Indian nationalism, to social regeneration, to religion and to philosophy is immense. Future generations will be grateful to him for the reforms he effected and the attitudes he inculcated. Before his birth in the year 1824, there were many abuses in Hindu society: child marriages, prohibition against remarriage of widows, even child widows, suttee [sati], the inferior position of women in society, discrimination based on ancestral origin (caste distinctions) and untouchability, spurious scriptures and false interpretations of the scriptures. All this and more the Swami set himself to reform and when his soul departed his body in October 1883, he had boldly tackled these problems and had offered working solutions to them all. He was able to point out that in ancient India women had an honoured position in society equal to that of men, that the Vedas did not authorise the practice of idolatry or belief in more than one Deity, that all souls were alike deriving their just position in life not upon any heredity caste system or upon predestination; that child marriages were a social evil having no sanction in the Vedas’.
Rai’s politics was inspired by a reformist essence in his religious beliefs of which he was immeasurably proud. Much of it remains relevant to Guyana today.