An East Indian man has done it

Sep 07, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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One lazy Friday afternoon, I walked across from my section into the office of Martin Carter at UG. He was alone at his desk and his head was bent inside a book. I told him I was interested in knowing why someone of his good character ended up joining the cabinet of Forbes Burnham. Carter told me that to understand it, you had to live inside the experience of the sixties. He assured me that at that time, if one was interested in freeing Guyana from colonialism, Burnham appeared as the logical choice. Carter observed that Jagan in those days appeared as a wildly impractical man.
Years before I chatted with Carter, I had a discussion with trade unionist Leslie Melville (in the mid nineties). I asked Melville to explain the politics of the PPP in the sixties seeing that the PPP in power in the nineties did not appear as the good guy that young Indians were brought up to believe when it ruled Guyana. Carter sounded just like Melville and what Melville had to say opened up my eyes about Jagan in the sixties.
I will always remember Melville’s remarks about Jagan’s misunderstanding of his country. He related a story that helped to bring down Jagan’s government. Melville explained that after Jagan won the 1961 election, his machine appeared as a lion set to humiliate the African Guyanese and their party. He described how the PPP held a rally and passed through the streets where the PNC constituencies were. They mocked the PNC and its supporters. According to Melville, it was a self–destructive course Jagan was on.
On Wednesday, in the evening darkness on my verandah with the help of a lamp, I read one of the most engrossing accounts of the politics of Cheddi Jagan in the sixties written by someone who has now committed himself to the revisionist interpretation of contemporary Guyanese history.
Professor Clem Seecharran rose to fame in this country with his iconoclastic assessment of Cheddi Jagan in his seminal work; “Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer.” It would be out of place to say that Seecharran did a hatchet job on Jagan. More appropriate it would be to remark that it was a profound exposure of the flawed politics of Premier Cheddi Jagan.
The work I now refer to is: “Whose freedom at midnight: Machinations toward Guyana’s Independence, May 1966.” I would not recommend this work to East Indian Guyanese in their sixties and seventies. It is too late for them to throw off the decades of Jagan’s manipulation of their psyche. What can they do at that age to redeem themselves? Seecharran’s latest revisionist devastation of Cheddi Jagan should be compulsory reading for all East Indian young men from eighteen years and beyond.
This brilliant analysis would reveal to them that this man has used the previous generation of East Indians for his own selfish narrow politics. Seecharran’s revisionism is instructive because it also paints Jagan in the identical way Leslie Melville described to me – a man whose politics was insensitive to the other racial half of Guyana.
Let me quote Seecharran on this score: “Jagan was discernibly adept at garnering Indian loyalty – and keeping it, manipulating crucial Indo-Guyanese with dexterity. That was why he was able to survive the split in 1955 and proceed on the basis of Indo-Guyanese invincibility to gain re-election in 1957…Burnham was rudderless and his African supporters clueless (like their contemporary situation in Guyana).”
Here is the part in Seecharran’s analysis that reminded me of my conversation with Melville: “Jagan was re-elected in August 1961. Jagan organized a tawdry, triumphalist parade. His jubilant Indian supporters repeatedly behave in a manner humiliating to African by-standers: (sic) they dragged the symbol of the PNC, the broom behind their vehicles; some displayed small coffins marked “PNC.” Africans were demoralized by another electoral defeat.”
There are other sections of this fine piece of writing that should finally put to rest the conceptualization of East Indians that Cheddi Jagan is a Guyanese hero. Throughout his evaluation of Cheddi Jagan, Seecharran paints the portrait of a man over-zealous to implement communism in Guyana, contemptuously dismissing the advice of powerful men around the world that he was heading for self-destruction.
I continue to lament the absence of East Indian writers who ought to delve into the history of the politics of Cheddi Jagan with a view to exposing his destructive instincts that in turn devastated the East Indian community. At last, we see revisionism of the PPP’s history being written not by Guyanese of a certain ethnicity that can cause PPP supporters to say that they are biased, but East Indians themselves.

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