The PPP lives in what it perceives to be a binary local universe: there is the party and there is the opposition. As such every individual, organization or entity in the country falls into one of these two categories, not excluding the various segments of civil society. In its over-simplified worldview impartiality, neutrality or even objectivity are not to be found in the political sphere, and it behaves much of the time as if that is the only sphere of human endeavour.
During the party Congress held last weekend General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo was quoted as saying: “… we support NGOs. We support them because many perform a useful task but when they serve as a means of division when they believe that an unelected few can arrogate to themselves that their voice must be the voice, must be the monopoly voice and they are … the only thing that matter[s] in a democracy, then we will fight that to our very core because we are a political party that will never ever allow that to happen.” What that means in practice is that every critic or anyone who adopts a contrary view to one favoured by the PPP mainstream is viewed as being aligned to the opposition.
It was President Irfaan Ali who put that position more directly, when according to the state newspaper he spoke at Batavia last week about the infiltration of certain unions and associations by APNU+AFC. He made specific mention of the Guyana Teachers’ Union which was hardly a revelation in terms of what the party thinks, since the government from the beginning has been categorising the teachers’ strike as political in nature. Never mind that the facts stare them in the face, and the teachers even in their own constituencies have been insisting the industrial action was about better pay. Freedom House has failed to grasp that it is nothing less than absurd to suggest teachers would be contented if the opposition had not manipulated them into believing they needed better salaries.
But then in relation to the NGOs the President expanded on Mr Jagdeo’s theme: “If you look at … some of the associations like the APA…they operate purely from political bias, they operate in a political motive as against the National Toshaos Council, which is the national body elected to serve the Amerindians of our country,” he was quoted as saying.
As the law stands the people selected to serve the Indigenous communities are the Toshaos and Village Councils, and it is they who deal with all relevant matters on an ongoing basis. The National Toshaos Council normally meets every two years, which is hardly frequent enough to address immediate issues, in addition to which it does not have the power to override the Toshaos and Village Councils. There have in any case been any number of complaints in the past about the ruling party’s moves to control the National Toshaos Council, as well as about the nature of its elections.
“We have to follow and understand the basis through which these organisations are operating,” the President was quoted as going on to say, “And we have to appreciate that many times these organisations carry a political view.” In other words there is no acceptance that an association whose avowed purpose since its inception is to further the interests of Amerindians could really be doing that; it must in actuality be working for the political opposition. Just like the teachers, the idea that while Indigenous concerns might not be in tandem with government policy they are still not political in origin is an alien concept for the PPP.
In terms of its evolution the main opposition, of course, has regressed to its anti-democratic days following the attempt to rig the 2020 elections. Since then it has not really come to accept what its actions at that time represented, acknowledge them even within the party, and create for itself a new sense of direction which internalises liberal-democratic principles. All the pretence surrounding futile court cases will not help it redefine itself.
In the meantime the PPP has used the attempted fraud in 2020 as a justification for reviling the main opposition, saying it is characterized by divisiveness and racism, while it, in contrast, represents unity. So if this is really the case, why, it will be asked, do people still support the opposition? Mr Jagdeo’s answer during the party Congress last weekend was that it was because “the PNC has been very clever; they have used a combination of lies and falsehoods to keep people away from us by redefining what this party is … We are ensuring that all these lies are answered on a daily basis, on a weekly basis.” They will probably find that all that rhetoric and denigration of the opposition will still not be enough to coax the opposition’s core supporters into their party.
As it was the 32nd Congress last week brought no surprises. Even although, as was discussed in our editorial yesterday, the PPP voted to change its constitution to eliminate the Marxist, Socialist elements, in one sense that constituted little more than a formal recognition of what obtains in practice already. What did not change was the commitment to democratic centralism. When asked about this retention later the General Secretary defined it as majority “rule,” but this is hardly accurate since as a concept it reflects less of the democratic and far more of the centralism.
As Mr Ralph Ramkarran explained in his column last week in terms of party elections it allows the election of a central committee at Congress and then for that committee to subsequently elect the various officers like the General Secretary. It also elects the much smaller Executive Committee which takes decisions between meetings of the Central Committee. This, he wrote, allowed a tight grip on the election process, and was opposed to the more democratic procedure by which leaders, office holders and executive members would be elected individually by the Congress delegates.
It might be noted that a limited group like the Executive Committee can be dominated by a very few individuals, or even just one individual, as illustrated by how presidential nominations are decided, where Mr Jagdeo has been seen as the kingmaker.
But apart from controlling PPP elections, the system has other implications. Democratic centralism was first introduced by Lenin in 1921 when he declared that the Communist Party was not a debating society but a “vanguard party” and that untrammelled discussion would produce disagreements and factions. However, he did not want to inhibit lower-level party members from suggesting ideas, so there should be some level of free discussion, but once a vote had been taken all discussion had to cease, and every member was bound by the decision taken. This was the combination of democracy and centralism. Under Stalin, however, it had plenty of the latter and little of the former.
Where relations with outside forces were concerned, since it was the vanguard party responsible for leading the revolution it had to be unified and disciplined, so it was not amenable to ideas contributed from outside once a decision had been taken. And that decision, as said above, bound all members. This was a system devised early last century in historical conditions which bear no relationship to our own. Nevertheless, there is something of the ‘vanguard party’ sentiment still lingering in the PPP, which is possibly why it is so hostile to opposing views or even novel approaches falling outside the scope of its own decisions.
Mr Ramkarran wrote that democratic centralism should not have been retained in the party’s constitution, and one cannot help but feel that were it removed it would open Freedom House to the fresh air of democratic debate both within the PPP and without, and make it less paranoid about criticism. For all his defence of democratic centralism, Mr Jagdeo was reported as saying that the party supported the separation of powers and an independent judiciary although sometimes “this belief is tested.” He also spoke of his party’s belief in a free press and a plurality of opinions. Thereafter, however, as indicated above, he proceeded to attack certain NGOs thereby revealing his true sentiments about how much ‘plurality of opinions’ his party was prepared to tolerate.
At a practical level it is simply not possible in our current circumstances to extinguish all criticism or attract the bulk of the electorate into a single party, thereby creating a form of one-party state. Whatever the faults of the current opposition, as long as there are national elections every five years there will be some kind of formal opposition, in addition to which an approach born of democratic centralism will not create the unity of which the President and General Secretary like to boast.
Furthermore, simplistic analyses which see the society in purely political terms, and which characterise every person and every organization as associated with one party or the other, will prove inimical to the PPP achieving the ends it seeks. Societies are multi-dimensional, and many of those dimensions cannot be crammed into boxes labelled by the party.