Expired Strategy

Dec 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Mr. Lincoln Lewis took strenuous objection to my citing him as one of the new purveyors of the old divisive “us” against “them” discourse that has fuelled out political strategies since Independence. I cannot imagine why. His intervention, in fact, served as a remarkable restatement of what I had described.
He labels the PPP as “rapacious” – a quite loaded word and “is a Government that breaks the law with impunity, tortures citizens, employs Gestapo policing tactics to silence and drive fear into people.” This is quite in line with the position I had claimed of him and his colleagues: “the PPP was “fascist” – Hitler, killer of 6 million Jews is invoked; was committing economic “genocide” against Africans – invoking millions genocidally murdered in Rwanda and the Congo; perverted; corrupt, violent etc.”
People like myself are “afflicted” and will have to be “purged”, because we have a “wicked mindset” and are bereft of a “sense of right and wrong, a moral compass” unlike of course, Mr Lewis who is seized with an abundance of the latter qualities. Unlike me also, he has the “honesty and willingness to deal with whatever circumstance emerges and make decisions guided by time-honoured principles, laws and conventions.” This is the classic creation of the ‘other’ – with all negative qualities and secondly the comparison of that ‘other’ to the self – the antithesis imbued with all the “good” qualities. The narrative of “sin and sinners” is invoked.
Mr Lewis cites his noteworthy opposition to the PNC in the pre-1992 era, but I believe that he misapprehends and takes unnecessary umbrage at my categorisation of his efforts as “new” – they are new to the discourse of hate, since I never found his polemics against the PNC regime to be as extreme.
In the compulsion to demonise the “other” that is reflexive in the binary narratives, even as Mr Lewis extols his struggle for “workers’ rights; respect for the rule of law, convention, constitution and electoral policy”, his inbuilt “moral compass” evidently fails him as he elides my own role in the opposition to the PPP government between 2000-2006 on the same issues he raises.
But Mr Lewis and the other purveyors of the latest version of the revolutionary narrative choose to evade the essential point I am making. Has the approach worked to increase our national good since independence? I am contending that it has not and in fact, has actually taken us backwards. I rejected the approach firstly for its teleological promise of leading us to salvation and the land of milk and honey. History has shown us – on both the communist and capitalist roads – that there are no silver bullets in emancipation and it will take constant contextual efforts to increase the levels of justice in any society.
In our particular circumstance, does Mr Lewis really believe that revolutionary exhortations will remove the government that he defines in such Manichaean terms? I remind him of our ethnically fractured polity. At no time in our history had that divide been bridged, and the conditions for such an approach been advanced, as in 1979 under the mobilisation efforts of Dr Walter Rodney and the WPA. Many assumed that after his assassination, a revolution would have overthrown the old order. It did not. As CLR James, the creator of our revolutionary romance genre pointed out, revolution did not come because the “people did not want civil war”.
The Guyanese people, with all our problems and hurts, still do not want civil war. And I believe that Mr Lewis knows this. But because of his disposition to struggle for underdogs, he feels that he has to “do something”. I am just suggesting he is using an expired strategy.
The change in demographics in this decade has opened up the possibilities of the politics of “in and out” rather that of “over and under”. There are no “built-in” ethnic majorities any longer. There need be no storming of the Bastille.
But even if one believes that some Indians – as the largest voting bloc – must be weaned away from the PPP for any opposition victory, is stirring up violence the way to accomplish this feat? Apart from the “extraction of booty and the infliction of pain” (as one now leader of the AFC educated us back in the first round of violence in 1998) from and on Indians for their stubborn refusal to change their habits (voting and otherwise) does not the creation of an atmosphere of palpable fear freeze the status quo?
I have no wish to silence Mr Lewis – he would remember that I was one of those, in our long discussions in his office, who urged him to speak out, outside of just trade union issues, because I felt that the ordinary African voter was being taken for granted by their “political” bosses. But I feel that his speech acts ought to be, at a minimum, delivered within a strategy that will offer them positive results than merely use them as cannon fodder.
Mr Lewis deploys against me the heaviest artillery the local purveyors of the discourse of hate can muster in their arsenal: the charge of racism. Racism, of course, is the articulation of practices designed to place or keep a group in subjugation solely on account of their race.
The fact that over the last two decades I identified the imperative for African voting behaviour as the consequence of an Ethnic Security Dilemma rather than being just “evil persons”; called for affirmative action in entrepreneurial activities for Africans to compensate for historical discriminations, an Ethnic Impact Statement on all government policies and program and for Equal Employment Opportunity legislation; supported a temporary shared executive arrangement as a precursor to more permanent mutually agreed to constitutional arrangements; etc. does not cut any ice. But this is the way of the binary: for one side to be all light, the other must be all darkness.
Finally about my warnings of violence emanating from the inflammatory rhetoric of the opposition, Mr Lewis advises that he will be “undeterred”. In 1993 when I predicted violence out of the PNC’s rhetoric of “ethnic cleansing” by the PPP and the latter’s refusal to deal comprehensively with the situation, Mr Lewis’ now colleague, Mr Kissoon, denounced such predictions as the utterances of a “racist”. In 1997, when I protested Dr Clive Thomas’ tendentious juxtaposition of African and Indian unemployment figures and suggested that it was “creating a mindset for extreme behaviour”, I was chastised. The rest, as they say, is history.
Does Mr Lewis really believe that a continuation of that history serves Guyana best?

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