Dear Editor,
I seek your indulgence to respond to Mr. Eusi Kwayana’s letter to SN (2025-01-28). Referring to an article I wrote in February 2024, he said in his comments “Mr. Ramkarran implied or said that I regarded Dr. Jagan as a racist…” He requested that I remind readers of the occasions on which he described Dr. Jagan as a racist.
In the article I commented on Professor Seecharan’s comments on Cheddi Jagan’s approach to the West Indian Federation in his book “Cheddi Jagan and the Cold War.” I said: “Relying on Jagan’s 1956 Congress Speech and Eusi Kwayana’s labelling of Jagan as a racist, Seecharan contextualises Jagan’s position [on the Federation] as one primarily conditioned by the ethnic factor…” My comment was clear. I was referring to my understanding and/or interpretation of what Professor Seecharan said. If Mr. Kwayana feels that my understanding and/or interpretation was inexact or inaccurate, he is free to correct it and give his own. He may take into account that his other language in the past – “the (coward) Jagan’s racial insolence and his cold-blooded organization of the East Indians for the conquest that has always been their dream” – leaves little to the imagination.
Mr. Kwayana criticized Jagan repeatedly and extensively in his 1956 Congress Paper on his attitude to race on several issues using sharp and accusatory language – “Here again Comrade Jagan goes into a profoundly racial analysis of the situation which is nauseating;” he accused Jagan of “[belittling] all Negroes;” “Is [Jagan] a servitor of racism and racist prejudices”. He also said that he was not accusing Jagan of being a racist. However, anyone reading this language and wide-ranging accusations would be excused for harbouring doubts.
In an article about Jagan entitled: “He never really left the Plantation,” written in 2022, I sought, perhaps inadequately, to summarise Mr. Kwayana’s views on Jagan and race. I said: “Eusi Kwayana responded bitterly to Jagan’s 1956 paper to the PPP Congress, with scattered accusations of racism…” One of the fiercest critics of Jagan for several decades on many grounds, including being a beneficiary of Indian racism, if not a purveyor thereof, Kwayana told him in a letter of June 6, 1990: “If I survive the victory over the dictatorship as I hope you will it will be my self-appointed duty to give the country a full description of the positive role you have played in the development of politics – an extension of my speech in the Assembly in 1987.”
If Mr. Kwayana is seeking to settle the historical record as to the views he has held on Cheddi Jagan over the years, he clearly missed the last passage above that I wrote. His views on Jagan had clearly evolved over the decades and the WPA’s collaboration with the PPP in the 1970s, in which Mr. Kwayana was an active participant, played no small role in ending dictatorship in Guyana.
Sincerely,
Ralph Ramkarran