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Everybody is the same in Freedom House
Dr. David Hinds in this newspaper’s letter pages of its May 14 edition, has offered one of the best arguments (“Ramkarran’s article is a testimonial straight out of Freedom House’s booklet”) in recent times of intellectual repudiation of the constant propaganda that comes out of Freedom House.
Such distortions may have an effect on young people in this country, not familiar with the contours of Guyana’s contemporary political history and the checkered past of the ruling party.
Arguing against power-sharing, Mr. Ramkarran (in the Chronicle of May 6) adopts a mathematical trick that is used extensively by all (I repeat), all PPP members, not just leaders.
Mr. Ramkarran describes the PPP’s success in crossing the racial divide, because in the elections since 1992, the PPP has secured more than fifty percent of the vote.
He goes on to outline the “phenomenal” achievement of the PPP by asserting this procurement of support from the other half of Guyana’s demography.
In other words, since 1992, the PPP, as an Indian party, is no longer an exclusively Indian party because it has consistently got electoral endorsement from African Guyanese.
We can ask Mr. Ramkarran to square this with the fact that at the last PPP congress in August, after the composition of the Central Committee was determined, Africans account for 15 percent of the membership of that body.
That aside, let us confront the traditional propaganda of Freedom House of the PPP’s possession of cross over votes. Mr. Ramkarran says Indians are forty percent of the population and the PPP won fifty four percent of the votes in 2006, therefore, it has to be that the PPP has been getting an embrace from other races. Leader after leader, the PPP repeats this fiction.
The PNC, ACDA, GHRA, AFC, editors and commentators have not been alert enough to assess this non-fact. You do not have to be political in your evaluation when dealing with this measurement. All it needs is a mathematical correction. Editors and commentators should not be afraid of being accused of partisanship if they point out the mistake in that formula.
The simple, very simple fact, is that it is unscientific to extrapolate the percentage won from a population of persons who went to the voting booths and equate it with; first the register of total legal voters and secondly, the country’s total population. The PPP of course has to have its propaganda like all other parties. But this is dangerous propaganda that young minds need to be steered away from.
Dr. David Hinds has done an intellectual demotion of Mr. Ramkarran’s arithmetic and he ought to be congratulated on it.
The explanation is that the percentage of votes a party wins, does not correspond to the total registered electorate and the total population. Any school boy can understand that. One group of people can flock to the poll, while another set chose not to exercise their franchise.
The percentage that goes to the winner is the percentage of those numbers that went and voted. The 54 percent the PPP won in 2006, should not be explained by the PPP getting 40 percent of the Indian votes as corresponds to Indian standing in the census, plus 14 percent from other races. Finally on this matter, Donald Ainsworth, former PNC Minister, in an interview with this newspaper, has done the right thing by talking about how much of the actual registrants voted in 2006.
The last election saw the largest abstention of voters since 1992, and including the 1992 poll. Reading the statistics in this context, it would show that the PPP got less than forty percent of the registered names on the electoral roll. How then can one say that the PPP received cross-over votes?
Dr. David Hinds in his letter, expressed surprise that Mr. Ramkarran of all people, could be so propagandistic in his analysis. He intoned that he didn’t expect that from Mr. Ramkarran. I am at a loss to understand this statement from Dr. Hinds. PPP politicians are nice people like everybody else.
At Glen Lall’s last birthday party, one of the top names in the PPP came up and shook my hands. Last week at the seawall, one of the most senior Cabinet Ministers came up and greeted me and my wife. PPP leaders are sociable personalities that act nicely to you. When it comes to politics, there is hardly any difference between them.
These people are prisoners of a deadly and dangerous political culture that has devastated this country under both the PNC and the PPP. There is nothing redemptive about this type of political culture. It is anti-modern and anti-nationalist.
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