Elected dictatorship and East Indians like me

Jul 16, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Days after the 2006 general elections, I wrote that on the day I saw the breakdown of the election results I was ashamed to be an East Indian. I take back not one single word in that article.

Let me repeat my emotion and mental thought on that day that I saw and heard the results – I was ashamed to be an East Indian.
The statistical outlay for that general election showed that the East Indian pattern remained with the PPP.

Looked at from any angle – moral, philosophical, political, scientific – it was wrong for the great masses of East Indians to have voted back the PPP into office.

There was in 2006 no conceivable reason why the East Indian communities should have returned to power a group of politicians that did not achieve anything for the bulk of the East Indian population but more so constituted and constitutes a cabal that is corrupt, undemocratic and hopelessly incompetent. Whoever said that life is fair?

Maybe there is no meaning to life when you think that politicians millions of miles ahead of what we have in Guyana ruling us could lose elections yet our venal conspiracy marches on here.

Portia Simpson in Jamaica, Keith Mitchell in Grenada, Kenny Anthony in St, Lucia and Owen Arthur in Barbados have lost power even though they are superior administrators to what Guyanese have had to put up with the past sixteen years. Did someone once say “Life is a bitch?”

What tears up someone like me is that I lived in a period where the East Indian population embraced the essence of democracy and fought for it in a multi-racial struggle; and fought for it long and hard.

Yet today none of the egregious violations of democracy brings a word of protest among those whom I saw in the front line against Burnham.

Words cannot describe the phantasmagoria of emotional frustration when I saw what happened to the bail denial of Oliver Hinckson.

There are two issues here that should be carefully separated. Does Mr. Hinckson deserve bail? The answer is yes. Let us leave that out of the present democratic dilemma we are discussing. We need to focus on the circumstances surrounding his bail rejection.

For some strange reason, the officials to receive the money for the bail were not there for the entire morning. Does any honest, decent mind believe that was just a random thing?

Well these things happen. But wait until you hear why Magistrate Robertson-Ogle’s granting of bail to Hinckson was nullified.

While the mysterious disappearance of the court/police personnel was lengthening, the Attorney-General Office was preparing documents to contest the Magistrate’s ruling in the High Court.

Then just before the morning of Monday, July 14, turned into afternoon, the High Court granted the AG Chambers its request.

The AG is Doodnauth Singh. When I was younger I saw Mr. Singh in the line-up in the fight for democracy. He was a protagonist in the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement.

This was a human rights group that was formed by lawyers, doctors and professionals from the East Indian community and jointly based at Dr. Prasad Hospital and the now defunct Medical Practitioners Hospital on Carmichael Street. Those were the days when certain people knew what dictatorship was.

I still have images of Doodnauth Singh fighting for Arnold Rampersaud, charged for murder of a policeman when PPP supporters attacked the Corentyne toll gates.

Looking back then, one wondered if Rampersaud was guilty but the fight was not just to save Rampersaud to struggle against dictatorship.

There can be absolutely no question in my mind that if under the Burnham regime Rampersaud was granted bail, then the bail people couldn’t be found, then the Magistrate’s granting of freedom was overturned by a High Court judge, then people like Mr. Singh and his “brilliant democratic fighters” in the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement and the countless thousands of East Indians would have cried “down with dictatorship.”

For me as an East Indian who fought unelected dictatorship alongside Mr. Singh and the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement, I deeply and at the profoundest level of morality believe Guyana has gone from unelected dictatorship to elected dictatorship. There is a statement by my hero Walter Rodney that I will always remember.

He told a public meeting that he often wondered when dictators open their mouth to speak of freedom if they were not afraid that they would choke to death. What went through the mind of the AG when his Chambers opposed bail for Oliver Hinckson?

Did Mr. Singh think of Arnold Rampersaud? I hope to ask Mr. Singh one day if we meet why the group was named the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement. Who was being discriminated against?

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