Who speaks for whom

Oct 04, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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There is another argument raging about which political party is or is not “multiracial”. All the parties (with the solitary exception of ROAR) since the fifties, of course, have insisted that they are the real McKoy. They do this, as we have pointed out ad nauseum, because a very strong norm has developed in Guyana that only such an entity is legitimate in our “land of six races”. Every party appropriates the label and denies it to others. For most of the modern period, however, the major parties insisted that “class” rather than “race/ethnicity” was the cleavage that needed to be bridged and attempted to sidestep the contradictions between the norm and reality of the “multiracialism” they practiced. The following was asked over two years ago – as it was every two years for the last twenty years.
What is a “multi-racial” party? Is it one in which the leaders are drawn from all or most of the various racial/ethnic blocs that constitute our polity? Is it one that has members drawn from all the various groups? Do the proportions have to roughly mirror the population or will any assorted agglomeration do? Or does it mean that the interests of all the groups must be expressly articulated and represented? Should those interests be subsumed under some notion of a “national” interest? Who defines that “national” interest? And so on.
In Guyana the parties took special pains to have individuals from all the major race groups in their executive and courted votes from across the spectrum. They constructed “national” manifestos. Yet when it came to elections, the majority of the people invariably voted for one of the two major parties which were firmly identified with a specific ethnic bloc – the PPP with Indians and the PNC with Africans. Some have contended that the WPA was the only authentic multiracial party. (The claim is now being proffered for the AFC) This is of course, begs the question posed above as to what is an “authentic” multiracial” party.
The question harks back to the roots of what constitutes “representation” in our “representative democracy”. The favoured approach, from both the old Liberal and Marxist ideologies was the “representation of ideas”. That is, once the interests of the group are articulated then anyone could “speak” for the group.
By constructing “national” platforms in personnel and content, both the PPP and the PNC claimed to be capable of speaking for “all”. Yet, based on the results of election after election, it is obvious that there was some way the people were getting signals as to which party better represented their interests – which turned out to be racial/ethnic every time.
These ethnic signals were encapsulated in the ethnic identity of the top leader of the party and conveyed during the “bottom house” meetings and by the use of code words that the people understood.
During the ‘70s the WPA, under the charismatic leadership of Dr Walter Rodney was able to demonstrate that it could credibly take on and stand a chance of removing the PNC regime, which was widely conceded to be a disaster for the standard of living of all the people, if nothing else. The interests of possibly a majority of Guyanese from all the blocs possibly coincided at that point.
Indians despaired at the ineffectualness of the PPP at removing the PNC and a substantial number supported the WPA’s approach. Africans were satisfied that the WPA would protect their interests. We believe that the WPA at this point was an incipient “multiracial” movement.
With the collapse of the Rodneyite approach after his assassination, and especially the return of “free and fair” elections, the people returned to looking to protecting their racial/ethnic interests. Most people have forgotten that even after the severe hardships that all Guyanese experienced by 1992, the PNC retained the forty-two percent of the votes that had characterised its constituency from the sixties. We doubt that even if Rodney had been alive the WPA would have garnered massive “multiracial” support.
Our insertion into Guyanese politics occurred in the immediate pre-1992 years and the WPA insisted to us that the “multiracial” constituency was still extant. We disagreed. By that time the Indians saw the PPP as capable of winning on its own in a “free and fair” election and the Africans had no faith that a possibly vengeful PPP would protect their interests. Both sides returned to huddling under their own perceived tent. And here we have remained. But can we arrive at a “multiracial” politics that represents all the various groups to their satisfaction?
If the parties could accept (as did ROAR) that they are ethnic parties based on their respective support bases, this could happen if they agreed to work together. After all, the “multiracial” party was supposed to only be a way-station to the “multiracial” government, wasn’t it? If we create the latter institution the argument about which party is “multiracial” or not becomes moot but this happy circumstance, however, is not going to happen in the near future.
But the distaste for acknowledging that one has an ethnic party goes deeper than mere opportunism in some. And this is the final semantic confusion we will deal with today.
A multiracial/multiethnic party must explicitly articulate the interests of the several constituent groups it purports to represent. This is done, as in the Democratic Party in the US, by having specific “caucuses” for its various “ethnic interests” – their African and Hispanic voters. There is no shame in this or apologies to be made. It is now conceded that in addition to the old “representation of ideas” there is the need for “representation by presence” especially for those who have been excluded or have experienced unique situations.
I say it again: in our specific situation, no one but the descendant of slaves can speak for the descendant of slaves. Slavery was not your ordinary, garden-variety oppression and the scars lie deep. The other groups of course, by definition, also have their own perspectives to be represented. “Representation by presence” by its operation, has its own liberating potential. There are some who sincerely want to belong to “non-racial” parties (where one individual can speak for all) but I do not think we can create this unicorn soon in Guyana. Where has it been created? We have to work with the material we have: politics has to be pragmatic, in the philosophical sense of the word.

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