Mrs. Janet Jagan; the last of the world’s great, ideological purists

Mar 29, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Mrs. Janet Jagan has died. She was a mother and a grandmother therefore condolences are in order. My task in life is to write about my country in the hope that one day these notes will help the generation that comes after mine understand their country’s history. My notes are my interpretation of course and at least they gave that generation one angle of what life was like in their country long before this new generation would have been born.

Mrs. Jagan was Guyana’s longest serving and oldest active politician. Her surviving contemporary is Mr. Ashton Chase but he retired from official activism decades ago. From the time she entered the political arena in the forties, she never stopped her participation in national and party politics.
At the time of her death, she was the editor of her party’s propaganda booklet, THUNDER and a leading member of the two highest forums in the PPP – Central Committee and Executive Committee. Her endurance makes her (perhaps) the world’s longest serving politician.

Because of the more than sixty years of political biology, there is a mountain of material on Mrs. Jagan from which one can assess her presence. This evaluation here will be one of many.
I met Mrs. Jagan when I was sixteen years old. I had a job in the Michael Forde Bookstore, arranged by my sister. Mrs. Jagan was the manager and had an office there. What I learnt about Mrs. Jagan in those days remained a guiding post in my continuing assessment of her decades later. One characteristic of Mrs. Jagan stands out so conspicuously that even the naïve and the short-sighted would not fail to miss it – she was passionately driven by ideology.

Ideology meant everything to Mrs. Jagan. She believed that ideology was the essence of a politician’s being. Her ideology was taken from the main strands of 19th century European culture. She chose communism.
By now, most students of politics would know that communism was one of the two famous ideologies of the 19th century that sought to dislodge the prevailing belief-system of liberalism. The other was fascism. Communists get into insane rage when you tell them that fascism and communism sprang from the same fountain and the tenets and philosophical explanations of both are uncannily similar.

Try as hard as they do to reject that analysis, it cannot be successfully argued against. A fascist and a communist are two persons whose conceptualization, approaches to life, politics and power are identical. The end result is that one becomes indistinguishable from the other.
Over the three decades that I have seen the politics of Mrs. Jagan, I can say that she was doctrinaire, ideologically inflexible and someone who accepted that in politics the means justify the end.

After more than sixty years in active political life, the controversies of Mrs. Jagan’s involvement in Guyana are literally endless. I would name people like Moses Bhagwan and Rupert Roopnarine as the having the kind of intellectual capacity to do a good, dispassionate manuscript on her contribution to Guyana’s tragedy.
However sad her beloved ones and her loyal supporters feel at this moment, the writing of history takes priority and in the compilation of Guyanese history, Mrs. Jagan, in my opinion, will emerge as one of those politicians that made Guyana into what it is today – a Caribbean tragedy that looks like it will have no pleasant future.

The story of Mrs. Jagan is a minefield. The rumours, tall tales, fictions have to be separated from the facts. But the facts are so oceanic that the writer will be able to successfully conclude his/her task.
This viewpoint here will be one of several over the months to come but for now it must be said that she died a very heartbroken person. The things that I heard from confidential sources who have access to the inner secrets of the PPP leadership indicated that she was deeply chagrined at what her protégés were doing in government.

I am absolutely sure that she couldn’t take the rapacious corruptibility. But Mrs. Jagan was always a person who ate her cake yet wanted it.
Her goal in life was to see the justification of communism in Guyana and the PPP as the vehicle upon which it would arrive. In that configuration, Mrs. Jagan saw the PPP as history’s incarnation. By extension, her protégés were the greatest gifts to the world. No act of terrible behaviour on their part, did she frown upon.
She would always tell the victim to see the larger picture – the triumph of communism under the PPP. She had no place in her mind for understanding individual hurt.

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