Dear Editor,
We wish to draw your attention to a letter titled, Guyana must rethink its membership in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which appeared in the Stabroek News on August 9, 2022, and authored by Swami Aksharananda. This is just one of his many diatribes condemning the OIC as a terror organization, notwithstanding, India tried to join the OIC. In fact, in 2019 India participated in the OIC Foreign Ministers Meeting attended by India’s External Affairs Minister Ms. Sushma Swaraj as a guest of honour. Following the meeting, India Daily Sahab reported on March 29, 2019, that “the presence of India at the OIC is an explicit indication of a major departure of the Arab world from its traditional stance and the changing stature of India. The invitation was an outcome of India’s hectic diplomatic engagement in the last few years with Gulf nations. India has been invited even though India is neither a Muslim majority nation nor does it have a Muslim as head of state or the government if one goes by the initial criterion for OIC membership.”
Swami should stop with his myth that India is Guyana’s biggest aid donor. India did not provide any grants to Guyana in recent times. In 2016 India announced a line of credit (LOC) to Guyana in the amounts of US$50 million for the upgrade of the East Bank Road (the Guyana government has approached the IDB for a US$100 million loan for this project as well), and US$18 million for the Northwest Ferry; and US$17.5 million for the upgrades of three hospitals (in Suddie, West Demerara and Bartica). However, while the upgrade on the East Bank Road is ongoing (it is not clear how much of the US$50 million was disbursed to the Guyana government); the contract for the purchase of the ferry was signed on January 31st, 2021, with the current government drawing down US$12.7 million (out of the US$18 million) and Juan Edghill travelling to India during this summer to commission said ferry. The Guyana government is yet to make public how much of the LOC funds has been disbursed by the Indian government for the other projects.
Interestingly, in December 2012 the Indian firm Surendra Engineering Com-pany Ltd (SECL) was given an advance payment of 20% (which amounted to US$3,636,000) of the contract price of US$150 million (the government of India provided a line of credit up to US$18 million, equivalent to G$4 billion) to assist in the construction of a specialty hospital in Turkeyen. However, the PPP government found evidence of fraud and financial irregularities, the company submitted fabricated, unsigned and inflated invoices with no evidence of actual payments made to support the expenditure claimed, enough to pursue criminal charges against SECL trying to recover almost G$1 billion. All these monies from India must be paid back in due time. However, traditional grant aid or official development assistance (ODA) has come from several OECD/DAC members – Canada, Japan, Norway, the UK, and the USA, and the EU institutions for decades now, for the same period i.e., 2016 – 2017 Guyana received a total of US$139.52 million in the form of grants from bilateral/multilateral donors. This data can be easily accessed from the OECD statistics portal.
Sincerely,
Ray Chickrie
Shabnam Alli
