A man and his dilemmas

Sep 09, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My job is to analyse the writings, political activities and political praxis of actors with some kind of connection in this country. Some people and organizations matter. Others don’t. I wouldn’t devote one single line to Joey Jagan. He doesn’t exist in Guyanese politics. He has no party membership, nor following. One can say the same for the political party of Ravi Dev, ROAR. I can’t remember what the acronym stands for but that is not important since Dev is ROAR and ROAR is Dev. But Dev is an opinion-maker. For years now he writes a weekly column in an influential newspaper and, unlike Joey Jagan, is part of Guyana’s political discourse.
Quite a large number of persons welcomed Dev (and his side kick Ryhaan Shah of JIHAD fame -can’t remember what JIHAD stands for either). What Dev did was shaped his politics in such a way as to make it appear that he was against the prevailing political culture and saw the PPP and PNC as practitioners of that ritual. He secured political interest because of a game he invented and which he named, the Ethnic Security Dilemma.
Dev was smart. If you are going to be accepted in this society as a politician it is important that you openly acknowledge that the two major races have intense feelings of being wronged by the social evolution of the Guyanese society.
So Dev requested ethnic balancing in the security forces because East Indians continue to receive physical blows from Africans and they have no faith in the security forces. He called this the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma. He and Ryhaan Shah bitterly berated the PPP Government for not shifting the fundamental base of the security services and the public sector to dissolve the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma. He tacked on to his advocacy for East Indian rights, the African Ethnic Security Dilemma. This means that Africans will forever be insecure because they do not have economic power and now they have lost political power. Dev’s politics then became very simple – give East Indians physical security and give Africans economic assurances.
This was a water-proof theory that did not originate with Dev but can be traced back to the arguments of so many after 1992 including the WPA, GHRA, UG academics, some trade unionists among others. But Dev rose to prominence because he was an East Indian that was saying Africans need to have a niche. His politics earned him an invitation to speak at the funeral service of Ronald Waddell where it was expected he would explain his twin Ethnic Security Dilemma. What many of us did not know (and I suspect Dev did and this explains his soft approach to the PPP bordering on support) was that the PPP was feverishly working on removing the basis of the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma.
This has been completed. The security forces have been taking in East Indians. After Henry Greene retires, the next in line are two Indians. Indians are climbing up the army ladder. Indians control the upper echelons of the public sector. Ravi Dev has dropped the African Ethnic Security Dilemma as if he held a ball of fire in his hands. Dev, as an Indian rights activist, as an Indian supremacist achieved his goal. The Indian Security Dilemma no longer exists. The security forces are in a vexed mood. They are prepared to shoot down people they suspect to be insurrectionists, terrorist or those who call themselves freedom fighter like Andrew Douglas (one of the Mash Day escapees) did. One of the claims of African rights activists is that the Guyana Police Force shoots down African youths with impunity. In other words, African rights activists are saying the Africans in Guyana have both a physical and economic security dilemma.
But the man who pushed this so-called theory is not only silent but is engaged in the proliferation of some nasty political ideas. Space has run out for me analyse the latest column of Dev (“Ballots, not bullets,” KN, Sunday, Sep. 6) I will devote a forthcoming evaluation of the contents of that article but it is indeed a loathsome piece of political assessment. After referring to the Africans as a minority (they are not; they are a few points below the number of Indians), Dev argues that this minority wants to usurp the role of the majority, East Indians.
To do this they have resorted to violent street politics. There isn’t one line, not one line of the vicious policies of the Guyana Government of which it deserves to wear the label of “elected dictatorship.” More on Dev later.

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