Ballots, not bullets

Sep 06, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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As a card-carrying member of the opposition with a Parliamentary seat between 2001 and 2006, I was forced to spend quite a bit of time reflecting on exactly what ought to be the role of that position. It is not that we hadn’t done so before – since our return in 1988 we had written reams of analyses that, inter alia, pontificated on what politicians from both the government and opposition ought to be doing in the “new political culture” we had proposed. The reality of being involved in the maelstrom of “politics from the inside”, however, compelled a whole new perspective.
The perspective had been articulated most pithily by Michael Ignatieff after he retired from academic life (Harvard) and entered politics (Canada): “In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.”

The sad reality is that in Guyana, the politicians – from both sides of the House – are governed by conventions and rules that rest on intellectual foundations that are literally false to our reality and by continuing to hark to them, have ruined the lives of Guyanese for over half a century. While the architects of our independence most severely criticised the institutions under which we were governed by the colonial power, Britain, after independence they retained the essence of the old political arrangements that were premised on a totally different sociological reality.
Britain’s majoritorian democratic institutions were constructed on the liberal notion that the individual is, and ought to be, the subject of political action. The institutions work to the extent that the populace (or a large enough section of it) conceive of themselves in such terms and vote for political parties based in the latter’s stance on the pertinent issues of the day.
A “floating” pool of voters is created that can then swing one way or the other to ensure that governments can periodically be voted in or out of office. The opposition’s duty in such a society is to “oppose” the government initiatives on contested issues as vigorously as possible so as to sway the “floating pool” in their direction. The issues, of course, concern interests that are held as vital to the voting public.
In our country, by 1964, we did not have a pool of “floating voters”. The ethnic riots had polarised the country to such an extent that elections became ethnic censuses. The primordial nature of our politics created a situation where the issues that mattered to the two major sections were conceived in apocalyptic terms: ethnic security dilemmas dictated strategies of capturing power “by any means necessary”.

The rigging of elections after 1964 – to keep the party of the minority African section in power and address their security dilemma – made the issue moot but only served to harden the ethnic divisions. Yet we acted publicly as if a “floating voter pool existed”. The free and fair elections of 1992 verified the old orientation; placed the party supported by the majority Indians in power and precipitated a call from the WPA for Africans to “organise for their survival”.
The hard line, and eventual violent strategy, of the opposition PNC in the post-1992 era was reinforced by even more violent extremists that sought to protect the interests of the “minority” African section. There was action and reaction. The tragic irony of Guyana was that the opposition politicians were locked into their realpolitik past and refused to acknowledge that demographic changes were inexorably altering the premise of their ethnic security dilemma.
Because of persistent migration by the Indians and Africans from the coast, Guyana was becoming a nation of minorities with the Amerindians in the hinterland increasing both absolutely and relatively to form a critical “swing vote”. The African Security Dilemma had been solved and the once irrelevant liberal premise now offered a way out of our morass.

Early in the post-1992 days, the PPP, ever driven by political imperatives, caught on to the drift and in addition to wooing the African vote, initiated a single-minded drive to bring the Amerindians under their tent through sustained attention to their developmental needs. Their efforts paid off – marginally so in the former group but massively so in the latter: as with minorities the world over caught between competing larger blocs, the Amerindians tend to go with the group with the purse-strings and power.
In politics, there is a process describing the potential for influencing political consciousness dubbed the “reverse J curve” effect: groups become restive and open to change not when conditions are going downhill (the immiserization stage) but when things have begun to improve (the cusp of the “J”). The opposition, however, not only ignored the possibilities for exploiting possible dissatisfaction in the ranks of the traditional Indian support-base of the PPP as conditions improved by 1997 but actually exacerbated the physical Ethnic Security Dilemma of that group by their antics in the streets. Later when they, at a minimum, equivocated on the mind-numbing Indian-directed violence emanating from Buxton (“there are no criminals in Buxton”) they not so incidentally effectively destroyed the efforts of ROAR to mobilise Indian support for addressing both Security Dilemmas. The conciliatory efforts by Corbin by 2004 were too little and too late and adjudged to be merely tactical.

In the last couple of years there have been persistent efforts to not only encourage the opposition into the streets to take on an “elected dictatorship” but actually to justify the armed outrages that have scandalised the country and further polarised the society. This approach not only locks out any possibility to exploit the new opportunities for introducing fluidity into our political system, but in a society as small as ours, ensures that the old political premises will stultify our politics for another half a century.
Rather than focusing solely on governmental excesses why not spend time on the existing democratic possibilities? “A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences (of their ideas) and prevent them from doing harm.” The hope for Guyana lies through the ballot, not bullets.

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