Political Strategies

Jul 27, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

I thank Elder Eusi Kwayana for responding to my column, “Elected Dictatorship?” Unlike what Mr Ramjattan intimated, at no time did I claim that Mr Kwayana’s approach was “unintellectual”.
I come from a tradition where an intellectual has to live his values and not merely ‘know’ it cognitively.

From that perspective, I noted: “Mr Kwayana is one who strives to live his truth and his pronouncements are consequently not mere intellectual wordplay but insights distilled out of experience.” I requested him to share his “insights”.

Mr Kwayana confirmed my assessment: “Experience in Guyana is a textbook for me and I do not go first to other textbooks to be informed or tutored about that particular subject, not in the past and not now.”

No living person has lived the “textbook” of Guyana as profoundly as Mr Kwayana, and we can only give praise that he is still around to offer us guidance.

In referring to my concurrence that the PPP has acted “dictatorially” on occasions, he points out: “Here we enter on tricky land. Mr Dev is slipping into an arithmetical definition of dictatorship.

To follow him I must ask where do we find the number of “occasions” allowed a government for authoritarian or dictatorial acts before it becomes a dictatorship?”

I am sorry that Mr Kwayana has not followed the discussion on “dictatorship” in KN over the past year, because it is precisely this logic of tallying “excesses” that emanates from those who focus on simply cussing out the PPP as a “dictatorship” rather than utilising the still available democratic mechanism of the ballot box to deny the PPP the majority that gives them the platform to launch their excesses.

I am not asserting that the nature of the PPP regime should not be analysed. There is “text” and there is “context” and the two can never be disjunctured: the latter always conditions the significance of the former.

The word “fire!” yelled while playing “bun house” has a different import that when yelled in a crowded theatre.

In his latest riposte to my rejection of the term “elected dictatorship” to the PPP administration, one interlocutor, Mr F. Kissoon complained whether persons reading his description of the government as an “elected dictatorship…(with)…forms of state power that are worse than under Burnham’s autocracy” would take to the streets and violently attack the government?

Firstly, the writer dishonestly now alters his “text” and raises his estimate of the Burnhamite regime to an “autocracy”, whereas he had previously denounced it to the man’s daughter as a “totalitarian dictatorship” – to which I had reacted.

Then he disingenuously ignores the context of his yearlong polemics – a Guyana under siege by an armed insurgency that had slaughtered dozens of citizens in their beds.

An insurgency that had been instigated by certain “”sophisticated political leadership”, who entered the village of Buxton and misled many of its young people, according to Elder Eusi Kwayana.

I merely suggested that the intellectual author should take “care” that his analyses, always couched in highly polemical language, did not rationalise the insurrection.

In my estimation, once a government has achieved the status of a “dictatorship” its removal is justified “by any means necessary”, including armed insurrection. But I also believe that before we arrive at that point we have to ensure that all peaceful means have exhausted.

It would be interesting for someone to repeat Mr Kwayana’s exercise, which demonstrated that the Burnhamite government could not be removed through the ballot boxes, in our present circumstances. I do not have to lecture Mr Kwayana of how easily Guyana could slide into racial war.

My own experiences in the ’60s as a boy in the mixed village of Uitvlugt have made me very apprehensive of the consequences of polemics on “dictatorships” in an atmosphere of heightened tensions.

It is my contention that the accusations of “dictatorships”, elected or otherwise, have served to steer opposition strategies away from the tedious, mundane task of utilising the existent democratic institutions to effectuate regime change towards the easier, but ultimately far more dangerous one of shouting in frustration, “Dictatorship! Dictatorship!” Mr Kwayana, in his own person, has demonstrated how effective recourse to the Judiciary could be whenever the Executive or its agents overstep their mandate.

The opposition has to use the constitution more effectively. In the present, look at what Peeping Tom has wrought by staying on course with a single act of the government that he believed was ultra vires.

Secondly, the Indian community forms the bulk of the PPP’s majority and the opposition has to work out a strategy to break that majority. It is as simply stated – if not done (I realise) – as that.

The alternative, which no one wants to talk about, would be to form a minority government through armed means. How democratic would that be?

Indians utilise a simple heuristic when elections roll around: “under which party am I more protected?” They vote for the PPP because their Physical Security Dilemma is exploited by the PPP.

To those who say that Indians are “an unreasoning followership” as Mr Ramjattan recently did, who will not move, we have to remember that in the seventies when many of them concluded that the PPP did not have a viable answer to the PNC depradations, they flocked to the banner of the WPA of Walter Rodney.

ROAR, which was launched as a pressure group to protest crimes against Indians in the post January 12th 1998 ethnic riots in Georgetown, was transformed into an electoral vehicle only because it gradually dawned on its leadership that the PPP was not interested in addressing the Indian ethnic security dilemma by professionalizing the Armed Forces or the African one by practicing a truly more inclusive governance, which would lead to greater stability in political relations.

While ROAR articulated the concerns of the Indians, it was not seen as capable of “going all the way” and it was only going to “split the vote”.

The conservative Indian does not want to lose corn and husk but ROAR still secured one seat against the most virulent PPP electoral machine.

It is our contention that a true multi-ethnic opposition that over a sustained period of time articulates the security concerns of the major ethnic groups can deny the PPP a majority.

Before the last elections we raised the issues in our concept of a Centre Force, but that is grist for another mill.

Finally I support any and all calls for Elder Eusi Kwayana to receive the highest honour that this country can offer. No living person deserves it more.