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Mythology on display in Berbice today

Mar 01, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I would like to take a different angle in the debate between Rajendra Persaud and Hamilton Green that is currently taking place in the two independent dailies. The issue between the two is who was wittier in Parliament – “Boysie” Ramkarran or Forbes Burnham.

Though it is an interesting topic, I am more concerned with some comments of Mr. Persaud which I believe and insist that East Indian intellectuals need to confront because it is a mythology that has existed for far too long. Mr. Persaud digressed from his central subject to devastate the legacy of Forbes Burnham and to remind us of the CIA destabilization of the Jagan Government in the sixties.
No one can quarrel with those two items. But for a whole generation of Indians like me, we grew up hearing about what Burnham did that was bad. Not a line was ever written about Jagan except for little pamphlets distributed by Brindley Benn throughout the seventies and the first half of the eighties.

Mr. Benn’s medium was hardly effective. But he remains in Guyanese history as the longest critic of Cheddi Jagan. Khemraj Ramjattan recently said to me that he didn’t know of some of the things about Dr. Jagan until he read Clem Seecharran. He was referring to Seecharran’s award winning scholarly work, “Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-1966 (Ian Randle: Jamaica, 2005)
This is a fantastic work that could be interpreted as revisionist or iconoclastic, though the author may reject such interpretations and say his book is just mainstream history that he has researched. The phenomenal importance of this work is that Indian intellectuals that have been so long hooked on Cheddi Jagan’s evaluation of social forces in Guyanese history have an alternative explanation which is powerfully presented by Seecharran.

I have already done a review of this book on this page so that should not detain us. But why must we think that Ramjattan is alone in what he now knows? Thousands of others have digested the contents of Seecharran’s book, which documents Dr. Jagan’s surreptitious, devious and selfish undermining of Jock Campbell for narrow, political gains.
As more publications come out, the myth will be shattered that from the fifties onwards Guyana was a contest between the bad guy, Burnham and the good guy, Jagan. This is what Persaud has done in his debate with Mr. Green. This is what literally thousands and thousands of commentaries in books, magazines, journals and newspapers have done since the split between Jagan and Burnham in the fifties.

The missing link is what has been Jagan’s role since that time. And the facts graphically do not support the good guy versus bad guy theory. We can start with the admission of Dr. Jagan’s son, Joey. He told CN Sharma on live television that during the violent years of the sixties, his father and Premier Forbes Burnham used to meet regularly on the seawall and chat.
That never made the news in the sixties, but think of what will happen with Mr. Raphael Trotman if we open the papers and see that he meets regularly on the seawall with Mr. Jagdeo and they chat as if they are buddy pals.

That example may not be a substantial indictment of Jagan. There are two accusations among others on which Dr. Jagan needs to be reassessed. One was the Burnham dictatorship. Was it such? If it was, then how do you explain the solid agreement in 1985 between Dr. Jagan and Mr. Burnham to form a united party to contest the 1985 election which in the event of a victory the Prime Ministership would have gone to Dr. Jagan? How can the Burnham regime be assessed as a dictatorship, yet Jagan emerges unscathed and remains as the good guy even though he agreed to participate in that dictatorship? Guyanese are never told about this. Only one PPP leader has written about this episode and she has skirted around the issue.

Mrs. Jagan, in a letter to the Stabroek News a few years ago in response to Aubrey Norton, informed us that she opted out of the talks because she couldn’t stand Mr. Burnham’s crassness. At Dr. Jagan’s death anniversary celebration today, no one is going to touch on that subject.
The second indictment of Dr. Jagan is that in 1976, at the behest of the Governments of the USSR and Cuba, he declared “Critical Support” for a government that PPP leaders tell us was a dictatorship. That government was headed by President Forbes Burnham. I don’t know who is wittier – Burnham or Ramkarran. But this I know – Burnham and Jagan were twins.

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