Indian Demonisation and Shame

Sep 21, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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It did not surprise me that Mr Frederick Kissoon ignored the main point I made in my article, “Shame and the Public Intellectual”.

In his riposte “Shame and the psychiatrist’s couch”, he focused solely on the concept of shame as it concerned himself personally, rather than the wider implications of his anti-Indian bashing that I had raised.

We are in the throes of a concerted effort to delegitimise the elected government of the day and dehumanise their Indian supporters to justify the use of violence to force regime change. This is not in the interest of our country.

I am frankly very pleased that Mr Kissoon conducted a clinical evaluation of his persona and declared that he has no shame about his looks, colour, hair etc. But this was not what my article was all about.

Over the past year, Mr Kissoon has categorised, with increasing vehemence, the PPP government as “a dictatorship with forms worse than Mr. Burnham’s regime” and “an elected dictatorship”.

Concomitant with that description, he has also stridently blamed the Indian population of Guyana for being unreasoning, ignorant, racial “fools” who reflexively vote the PPP into office. He recently widened his lambasting.

Mr Kissoon has rejected theories that sought to explain Indian political behaviour, such as that proffered by myself, as a rational choice response to their ethnic security dilemma.

Rather than offering an alternative theory, Mr Kissoon has ignored Mr Kwayana’s caution and castigated a whole race of people – here Indians – in dehumanising language. Such insidious representations must produce repercussions.

It was Mr Kissoon who suggested the variable of shame as an explanatory component for his conclusion, not I, when he asserted repeatedly that he was “ashamed” of being an Indian because of how they voted in 2006.

Now this was an extraordinary statement: one may be disappointed or upset or distressed at the behaviour of others but to be “ashamed” of a whole group of people? This hinted at a hypothesis for Mr Kissoon’s tirades against Indians.

One feels shame for another’s behaviour when firstly, one identifies with the other and secondly, the behaviour has violated “the inner, critical voice (originally imposed by outsiders) that judges whatever we do as wrong, inferior, or worthless.”

Mr Kissoon is thus transmuting his internalised criteria of shame onto Indians as a whole and asserting, according to the literature, that Indians did not merely make a bad choice (which may lead to guilt) but most dangerously, that Indians themselves, as persons, are bad.

This is what “shame” is all about. A while back, we had another professor who claimed that Indians supported the PPP because they were bad – but she at least pointed to an external source that could be investigated – their purported “Hindu beliefs”.

Here we have the assertions of a man who declares himself to have no shame but can yet announce that he is “ashamed” of a whole group of people. From whence could this fount of acknowledged shame possibly arise?

We have been regaled in the past by Mr Kissoon, of his humiliations by the Portuguese upper stratum as the son of a cricket groundsman, and his rejection by a member of the said stratum as a suitable suitor for one of their daughters.

I have been touched by his stories of his humble childhood including the one about his only water gun but bemused with his obsession with the colour of Bollywood stars.

In the colonial era, it was commonplace to keep others in thrall by making them feel inferior; it still persists in some quarters.

Fanon analysed this phenomenon as “the internalization — or, better, the epidermalization — of this inferiority” in another colonial setting and made the connection between the psychological and the sociological effects.

But a public commentator cannot transfer his personal trauma onto a whole people – in an era of self awareness.

Indians, like any other group of people, will have – and must be allowed to have – the full expression of their humanity, be it good, bad or ugly. No imposed and internalised self-destructive criteria should force one to demand that a whole group of people react, as you would want them to, politically.

At a very mundane level, this expectation is most unrealistic: everyone has had his or her own formative experiences and their own heuristics for dealing with political choice.

At another level, it is most undemocratic and betrays the same dictatorial/authoritarian tendencies that Mr Kissoon excoriates in the PPP: he is the possessor of TRUTH (in capitals). Democracy demands that people be free to make their own choices.

In terms of Mr Kissoon’s categorisation of myself as a “failed politician”, I will let history settle that issue. I would like to believe, however, that by and large the reasons that propelled us to launch a political movement in late 2000 have been vindicated.

The crucial issues that we felt were sidelined by the political elites – the Indian and African Security Dilemmas (and possible solutions), the role of the Indian in the public cultural space, decentralised development, a more representative armed forces, etc, are now firmly on the national agenda. This was the goal of ROAR.

On one of Mr Kissoon’s innuendoes, I wish to assure him that he can speak freely on the matter for which a libel suit had been filed against Mr Ramotar. In a speech in front of my house in 2000, Mr Ramotar had claimed that I was not a lawyer.

I presented proof of my admission to the New York Bar on the 7th February, 1990 (it is a matter of public record there) to the local media at a press conference. I am not aware as to why Mr Kissoon feels that I should be ashamed of being a New York lawyer.

In a revealing parting shot, Mr Kissoon suggests disparagingly that I “return to little Berbice in New York”. No matter how Mr Kissoon may try to belittle the Indians of New York, it is unassailable that they have made it there – and made it big.

As Frank Sinatra reminded us, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. They should be emulated not ridiculed, as is the norm with Mr Kissoon’s fulminations against Indians.

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