East Indians reject elected dictatorship

Oct 16, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Human beings are in the main decent higher animals. Humans may have their faults but in the stream of things, they have upheld civilization for over two thousand years. People tend to subscribe to their own culture. They tend to want to be around those that look like them, think like them, and share their type of language and customs. We call this cultural bonding. It existed since ancient times.
The European battles after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire gave us the concept of nationalism.
The human mind however is a many-sided organism. The human mind instructs us to go beyond our love for our own. The concept at work here is reason. It was the great Roman thinker, Cicero, who achieved instant fame when he stunned Roman society by arguing that every person who lived under the Roman Empire, whether slave or citizen has reason and reason can make them think of a better life and reason can then do good and understand the difference between right and wrong.
We tend to want to belong to the flock. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot see when members of the flock are bad and should be punished.
It is because of reason that we will cast a stone against those of our flock that offend our sacred values. We in Guyana know about ethnic solidarity and the harm it can do to our own existence and that of the country we live in.
I had friends in the seventies who were decent humans and they would say to me, “Freddie I have nothing against East Indians but it is WE VERSUS THEM and I have to support Mr. Burnham.”
And by the hundreds of thousands, African Guyanese supported Forbes Burnham and his PNC party. Then decent members of the flock saw Mr. Burnham and his party members were doing wrong things to his own people and to the country. Members of the flock broke away and cast stones at Mr. Burnham because he had strayed from a decent path.
I saw that revelation because I lived inside that drama. I became a founding member of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) where virtuous African Guyanese had indicted Burnham for grievous wrong-doing against his country. They fought Burnham and they endured tremendous sacrifice so that Burnham could go.
The PNC went away in 1992 and we thought it was Day clean (using the name of the organ of the WPA) for the Guyanese people. This was not to be. One flock succeeded another. African domination went out and Indian hegemony came in. Look at the paper’s yesterday and you will see the leadership of Guysuco at a pres conference.
The African content is gone. The Indian content has replaced it.
After seventeen years in power, Indians have reclaimed their sense of right and wrong. They are speaking out against members of the flock who are doing evil to their country. The verdict in the Court of Appeal on Wednesday against state monopoly of radio is an historic occasion. It is a victory of human decency over the incestuous nature of the flock. Important to note that of the three-person panel that made that decision, two are Indian judges. One can imagine what went on inside the mind of the average African- Guyanese – “Oh, they are Indians in the majority, they will rule in favour of their Indian Government.” This was not to be.
I am convinced in my mind that the two Indian judges ruled on the basis of law and didn’t deliberate as Indian scholars. Though I believe for a long time the little oligarchs that run an elected dictatorship felt assured that in Guyana it is “WE VERSUS THEM and our people will side with us.”
That kind of indignity is coming to an end in Guyana. Just as African Guyanese saw that Burnham was doing wrong things, Indians are seeing through the moral, legal and political turpitude of the PPP.
I have always argued, using the theory of the American scholar, Fared Zakaria, that Guyana has an elected dictatorship. Zakaria showed how a freely elected administration can descend to horrible levels of violations thus desecrating the values of freedom and justice. He concluded that democracy is more than the free exercise of a ballot on Election Day.
If you read the decision of the Court of Appeal against state monopoly of radio you will see that though the judges didn’t use the word elected dictatorship, what they described is in effect the existence of a dictatorship in Guyana.
The court system is extremely slow, but let us makes use of it so we can free our country from elected dictatorship.

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