Same old story of destructive political leaders

Sep 14, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One should not dignify any argument that outlines a programme for democracy for all countries because all countries are not alike. Democracy and constitutionalism are different concepts (see the work of Fareed Zakaria on the difference).

What goes into confidence-building measures between warring factions in a country varies from territory to territory. Belgium and Switzerland are two European systems that have different constitutional arrangements from many of their neighbours, the reason being the nature of their cultural demography (so to speak)

Take Guyana. The PPP has won four successive general elections since 1992, whereas in all other CARICOM states, ruling parties have come and gone but the PPP remains. There has to be an answer for that. This is no puzzle to burden your mind.

People vote for racial parties in Guyana, moreso the East Indians because at the last elections a not so small percentage of Africans voted for the multi-racial Alliance for Change.

Against this theoretical background , one must understand the dangerous yet subtle theory of East Indian supremacy by that elusive figure, Ravi Dev. Mr. Dev comes within the long tradition in this country of destructive political leaders like Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Mrs. Jagan, to name a few.

I have read everything (I think so) Mr. Dev has written on Guyanese political evolution and contemporary Guyanese problems, and I am convinced, and honestly believe in my mind that he is one of the few political leaders (he is not really a leader because he has no following but he is a political voice) that adumbrates a theory of racial domination in Guyana.

I am not saying there aren’t others. Maybe Jagan, Burnham, D’Aguair, the BG East Indian Associations, League of Coloured People had such instincts but given the zeitgeist of their days, they didn’t want to delineate the ethnic lines the way Dev does it in the 21st century Guyana.

What is important to note about Dev is that he has access to intellectual properties so he can write a thesis on East Indian hegemony and masks it with a superabundance of theoretical obfuscations that safeguards him from intellectual abuse because only the intellectual community and similar strata can detect his epiphenomena.

I suspect that ACDA, the PNC, AFC, GHRA, WPA, Red Thread, newspaper editors and others do not pay much attention to Dev because he is not a politician that has constituencies that listen to him. But the harm in Dev is that the PPP becomes afraid of him because they feel that East Indian intellectuals and the Indian middle class would press them to adopt Dev’s advocacies and thus they take the step of implementing some of his prescriptions.

The most obvious one has been the obsession of Dev with recruitment of Indians to the Guyana Police Force and the GDF. This is going on at a frenetic pace.

Last week I critiqued his obnoxious sociological paradigm – the Ethnic Security Dilemma. (“A man and his dilemma,” KN, Sep 3) I argued that his intention was to analyse the inherent insecurities that block the maximization of Indian ubiquity in Guyana but in his subtle style he hid the supremacist content of his theory by attaching to it, something called the African Security Dilemma.

In that column, I promised to look at his venomous essay in KN for September 6 titled, “Ballots not bullets.” Here Mr. Dev fights for a shape of politics in Guyana where political parties must eschew violence and concentrate on winning power through the ballot.

This is normal politics. But is Guyana a normal polity? Why hasn’t the PPP lost any ballot contest since 1992 and all others in the history of Guyana except those that were deemed to be rigged? Here is where Dev becomes disastrous and poisonous.

In all his writings, he has never answered the question if Africans did not move away from racial voting when they gave the AFC six seats in 2006. Dev is so scared to answer that question that in a letter of mine demanding that he respond to that particular query, the editor captioned my missive; “Freddie laments Dev’s evasiveness.”

Within this evasiveness lies the tradition that Dev comes from, a tradition of preaching ethnic protection and ethnic ownership of country. It goes back to other leaders both Indians and Africans, whose understanding is that their group is entitled to ownership of Guyana.

We must avoid bullets at all cost. But the ballot has to provide a future for all race groups in this country. So far the ballot has only led to ethnic domination.

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Same old story of destructive political leaders

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