By Baytoram Ramharack
Janet Jagan established a consistent, longstanding fraternal relationship with Marxist leaders, some extending outside the ambit and direct control of the Russian Soviets. In May 1960, for instance, she recalled, with excitement, a private meeting she held with a charming Latin American revolutionary leader, ‘Che’ Guevara: “…the most outstanding event…remains in my memory – my visit to ‘Che’ Guevara…While his face is firmly planted in my memory, I cannot recall a word of our conversation…”. Two years later, in August 1962, she felt extremely privileged to sit in private meetings with Chinese communist leaders, Mao Zedong and Chou-en-Lai. She found Chou, who chatted with her in English for two hours, to be a Marxist revolutionary with a “fascinating personality” who spoke to her “with great charm and ease.”
It is noteworthy that when President Kennedy spoke of the “desirability of inviting Duncan Sandys [the Colonial Secretary] to Birch Grove since he is a significant figure in any decision which HMG may make [emphasis added]”, an attachment to this secret document included a comment attributed to Janet Jagan, the Minister of Home Affairs, on June 20, 1963. The statement, coming at the height of the Cold War, quoted Janet as saying that “British Guiana will establish closer relations with Russia and Cuba when it becomes independent” and that the British Guiana Government was “deeply grateful” to Fidel Castro for assistance provided during the prolonged 80 days strike that began on April 20, 1963.
In December 1982, two years after Burnham assumed imperial powers under a new constitution and the assassination of world-renowned historian, Dr. Walter Rodney, Janet Jagan journeyed to Moscow to express her party’s fraternal support for the world communist movement on the occasion marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet communist state. On December 23, she addressed a meeting of the Moscow Area Branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Janet expressed her Party’s sense of privilege for being invited to participate in the “sparkling salute.” With metaphorical symbolism, Janet told the gathering of communists in the Soviet Union, “Your labour is for the cause of humanity. We are confident that your country will pave the way to Communism and a bright future for all mankind. And most importantly, you continue to inspire the people of the world in the solution of the greatest problem facing the world – the preservation of world peace and socialism!” Ten years later, Janet witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the virtual outlawing of the CPSU in 1991 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, an alcoholic, had replaced Mikhail Gorbachev, the political reformer responsible for dismantling the Soviet Empire with the introduction of his glasnost and perestroika policies.
By no means was the collapse of the Soviet Union the only political turning point Janet witnessed during her Golden age. From the perch of political power, following her electoral victory in 1997, she witnessed her own speedy downfall. Despite her public declaration to be “a President of ALL the people,” her swearing-in ceremony, as well as her presidential tenure, was marred by street protests led by Africans, some of whom stuck pins and needles into custom-made “voodoo” dolls during “obeah” chants. The protesters were symbolically expressing their rejection of the 78-year-old matriarch seen as a foreigner not deserving of occupying the office of the Presidency. Janet remained sensitive to anti-Semitic comments, but as she told David Dabydeen, she took comfort in knowing that during the street protests, there was “no anti-semitism because Guyanese are not a people with such racist views against Jews.” Columnist Freddie Kissoon explained the unfolding scenario leading up to Janet’s fall from political grace this way: “Mrs. Janet Jagan created public consternation when she threw a Court Order over her shoulder at a ceremonial event at State House after the 1997 elections. The actual swearing-in had already been secretly completed and the ceremony was merely perfunctory.”
However, the street protests were not simply premised on peaceful expressions of political opposition to Janet’s ascension as President of Guyana. They were accompanied by the beating and mauling of Indians in the streets of Georgetown. Any Indian was assumed to be a loyalist of Janet Jagan and the PPP and became a potential target of the protesters. The anti-Indian attacks, culminating on January 12, 1998, were documented in a report compiled by the Guyana Indian Foundation Trust (GIFT). By then, Janet had already concluded that Opposition Leader Desmond Hoyte and his supporters shared “an intense dislike” for her. It seemed, after all, that her “whiteness” was a matter of serious concern for many Guyanese, particularly African Guyanese.
Suzanne Wasserman, a relative of Janet who produced a 50-minute video documentary of Janet Jagan in 2003, under the title “THUNDER IN GUYANA,” captured some of the first family’s reactions to the street protests in 1998. Nadia Jagan, Janet’s daughter-in-law, visibly disappointed, commented that Janet, who carried herself modestly, and who never lost her American accent, was “more Guyanese than most you will meet.” That was a remarkable statement, considering that Janet was hounded out of office 20 months into her Presidency and forced to resign after a CARICOM-brokered intervention, which resulted in the signing of the “Herdmanston Accord” on January 17, 1998. Her presidential tenure, truncated by two years, paved the way for a young Russian-trained economist from Unity village, Bharrat Jagdeo, the 35-year-old graduate of The Russian People’s Friendship University (named after Patrice Lumumba), to become her replacement. Janet could never have expected, not even in her wildest dreams, that her hand-picked Russian-trained economist, who specialized in “National Economic Planning”, would emerge as Guyana’s staunchest advocate for a free-market economy and neo-liberal capitalism.
Patricia Mohammed, a feminist and well-known Professor Emerita at the University of the West Indies, has undertaken comprehensive historical research, commissioned by the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre, to document the life and legacy of Janet Jagan. However, whatever the nature of the history being documented about Janet for public consumption, this writer is of the view that there are some intriguing historical anomalies and open questions regarding Janet’s legacy, which cannot be left unanswered, particularly with reference to Janet’s political experimentation with Guyanese politics.
One, it is a rarity that a person born in another country, particularly a white person, could emerge as a political leader of a poor Third World country where racial animosity and strong anti-European sentiments exist. Janet escaped this political aberration – until she assumed the Presidency. Aside from her genuine commitment to hard work, she was a beneficiary of the charismatic appeals Indians held for Cheddi. Her popularity among Indians was not given to her profound ideological commitment and loyalty to Pro-Soviet Marxism, which, in hindsight, most Indians rejected, or simply did not comprehend. Even after her many years of service and struggle on behalf of the Guyanese people, Janet admitted that she simply “could not understand” the reasons for the demonstrated viciousness and angry protests directed at her candidacy, rather than at the PPP and its policies, during the 1997 electoral campaign.
Two, Janet was not simply an organizer and a Marxist propagandist. Her character unambiguously mirrored the image of an individual engaged in a long history of political control and censorship. It is a legacy of control and censorship that was bequeathed to the guardians of the PPP’s legacy, and one that the party and its core members seem to have accepted wholeheartedly, with relative ease. For example, Nadira Jagan-Brancier, Janet’s daughter, has done a remarkable job of making available Janet’s writings on the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre website. However, researchers will note that the website carries nearly ALL of Janet’s responses TO her critics, but the website deliberately omits direct responses FROM her critics. Such a policy of control not only deprives readers of a fair, reliable, balanced view, and a greater understanding of Guyanese political history, but it deliberately seeks to legitimize Janet’s version of the truth above all others. In some ways, it is a reflection of our fragmented political culture. Evidently, there is no room for criticism of the powerful matriarch. Lloyd Best, a close ally, and adviser of the Jagans, presented a damning assessment of Janet, which has tended to elude scholars: “I don’t think she had any insight into the complexity of the Guyanese situation, and she was the biggest buttress of Cheddi’s intransigence in Guyana. She was very hostile to dissent. In my judgement, she was a person who believed if you were not for me, then you were against me.” Lloyd Best’s assessment of Janet’s penchant for political control, in likeness to Brindley Benn’s observations, is quite stunning.
Three, there is a troubling aspect of the legacy of Janet Jagan, which remains buried in the historical archive, one that is intricately related to her Jewish heritage, her consistent references to her identification as a racial minority, and the protracted ethnic division in Guyana that defined the greater part of her political tenure. Janet understood the consequences of being targeted as a minority. Her assessment of Guyanese society was coloured by her own social and cultural experience as an American Jew and one which was apparently reinforced by her tenure in Guyana. Among her voluminous writings, extending well into several hundred, there is not a single narrative in which she wrote assessing the Indian-African ethnic conflict with a view towards advancing political solutions to this national tragedy. This was a glaring indication that Janet never really understood what Lloyd Best referred to as the “complexity” of the Guyanese situation.
Janet was not totally oblivious to the fact that the majority of her (and the PPP’s) loyal supporters were Indians. For most Indian parents whose children were attending the University of Guyana in the early 1970s, induction into the Guyana National Service (GNS) was an issue of grave concern to them. Janet Jagan, the PPP General Secretary at the time, explained the PPP’s opposition to the GNS requirements by penning two publications that were very critical of the scheme − National Service: An Act of Coercion (1974) and, An Examination of National Service (1977). In these publications, the GNS was deemed as “…a PNC para-military force [created] to back up the coercive apparatus of the State in maintaining a minority party in power.” Surprisingly, Janet Jagan did not specifically address the central concern raised by Indians in any of her two publications critical of the National Service, namely the geographical isolation and allegations of sexual abuse meted out against young Indian girls. For the record, neither Joe Singh (SN, 9/3/2008) nor David Granger (SN, 12/10/ 2008) addressed this issue in their glowing defense of the GNS.
Finally, and perhaps more troubling, was the manner in which Janet (and the PPP) dealt with (or largely ignored) the question of the ethnic security dilemma during her sojourn in Guyana. Two critical traumatic events of concern to her largely Indian supporters stood out during Janet’s tenure as a politician in Guyana: the Wismar atrocities of May 1964 and the riots of January 12th, 1998. During the former, in pre-independence Guiana, Janet held the all-important portfolio of Minister of Home Affairs. She voluntarily resigned from her ministerial position, in tears, following the atrocities committed against Indians in Wismar. In her Notice of Resignation on June 1, 1964, while complaining about not having the “power to curb or prevent discriminatory practices or correct injustices perpetrated by the Police,” she expressed optimism that “having a balanced and impartial Police Force” would be achieved. Historical records indicate that while Cheddi was wisely committed to the creation of a national army, the last Governor of British Guiana, Richard Luyt, whose arrival to the Colony was met with a resolution to have him recalled, supported calls for the creation of a multi-racial defence force prior to the events in Wismar. It was Luyt’s suggestion to move towards a comprehensive examination of racial disparity, which ultimately led to the 1965 ICJ report. Yet, even after Wismar 1964, the 23 years of PPP being in office, the events of January 12, 1998, and with the current PPP in power, state agencies, and institutions still do not reflect the professionalism and balance that was the source of Janet’s trepidations. Neither the PNC nor PPP seem committed to genuine collaboration that can forge a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic approach to governance.
TIME Magazine (March 8, 2022) posthumously named Janet Jagan as one of history’s 16 most rebellious women, situating her in the company of global personalities like Golda Meir (Israeli Prime Minister), Angela Davis (American political activist), Aung San Suu Kyi (Burmese leader), Susan B. Anthony (American women rights activist), Harriet Tubman (American abolitionist) and Mary Wollstonecraft (British feminist). Janet was a revolutionary and feminist who, according to Jock Campbell, believed that to achieve Marxist revolutionary transformations, people must die. This thought must have been foremost on her mind when Janet summed up her ideological belief of revolutionary sacrifice necessary for the cause when she told Peter Simms, in a private conversation, that “Enmore made us” and that “the Indian vote was solidly behind [us].” For Janet, in an ethnically divided Guyana, there was “no point having political unity” because “trust and agreement on a set of political ideas” simply did not exist between the leadership of the two major political parties.
Janet was a pro-Russian Marxist and a feminist influenced by her social and cultural moorings in the United States. She successfully harnessed Cheddi’s charismatic appeals to ensure that his Indian support base was mobilized through the propensity for hard work and effective organizational skills. She was the strategist par excellence of the PPP and the party’s unmatched organizer. The long reach of the PPP into the bottom houses of impoverished Indians was mostly the work of Janet, as well as Cheddi. Janet was the master propagandist, which was a central pillar of the PPP strategy to win over Indians and criticize anyone deemed anti-PPP. Her political popularity was enhanced by the perception of Indians of a young white woman dedicated to improving their livelihoods by abolishing the harsh and exploitative colonial system. The blonde hair white Jewish woman was transformed, metaphorically, into the adorable blue-eyed Indian “bougie.” In retrospect, Janet came to Guyana as a stranger, was initially rejected as an outsider by Cheddi’s father, and died of a broken heart. The ultimate national political prize, symbolized by her brief occupation of the office of the Presidency, which her party insisted she pursued, turned out to be a political embarrassment, and a bitter-sweet accomplishment. It was an accomplishment roundly rejected by a large section of the African population. Her determined political mission to engineer the creation of a pro-Soviet Marxist state in America’s backyard, now an anachronism, remains wholly unfulfilled.
Janet Jagan, the Jewish American radical feminist, is still celebrated as a liberator in some quarters of Guyanese society. Her legacy continues to overshadow home-grown Guyanese women, including Salamea, Esther Saywack Mahadeo, Sumintra, Kowsilla, Alice Bhagwandai Singh, Rajkumari Singh, and others, who also waged a legitimate struggle against hegemonic colonial control and European imperialism in British Guiana. Like Janet, they all deserve a prominent place at the table of Guyanese history.
Dr. Baytoram Ramharack teaches politics and history at Nassau Community College (New York). He has a forthcoming publication which is titled A Powerful Indian Voice, Alice Bhagwandai Singh: Reflections on her work in Guyana.
