Ravi Dev has abandoned his Government of National Unity spiel

Jan 18, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,

 

Happy belated Birthday to the great Martin Luther King Jr., who once said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it”.

I want to share this quote with my intellectual friend Mr. Ravi Dev. To Ravi’s credit, he has in the past identified there is an African Security Dilemma and an Indian Security Dilemma in Guyana. His “thought driven” solution and one that was informed by intellectual and moral integrity was a Government of National Unity which both recognised the ethnic dilemma and the observation of the Golden Rule….do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He called his version of shared governance “Federalism”

Over the years, Ravi has drifted from this position of moral certitude to his original position of “Indian racial domination” as enshrined in the early days of the formation of ROAR which essentially was an Indian Nationalist Party.

We were warned by David Hinds on 12 September 2000 that Ravi was opportunistic in his call for shared governance and he would revert to his original ROAR vision.

Writing in his regular “The Truth of the Matter” in a commentary entitled, “Rewriting History…Why?, David Hinds wrote “Mr. Dev’s and ROAR’s embrace of Alliance Politics, as the way forward is obviously welcomed and must be commended as it widens and perhaps deepens the movement.

But in the spirit of the new political culture that he subscribes to, he should at least tell his supporters and other Guyanese that he is now part of a wider movement whose history goes back to at least 1961 with the Eusi Kwayana Joint Premiership proposal. Mr. Dev and Dr Ramaharak should say that the WPA popularized “alliance politics” to Guyana’s post-colonial experience by its very formation in 1974 that brought together the race based ASCRIA and Indian People’s Revolutionary Associates (IPRA), and the leftist RATOON, and Working People’s Vanguard Party (WPVP).

They should say that it was the WPA that was the moving spirit behind the formation and sustenance of the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (CDD) and the Council for National Safety (CNS) in 1978 and the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) in 1986, organisations that brought the opposition political parties and civic groups together in defence and promotion of democratization.

David Hinds continued to say in this article: “ROAR loses a golden opportunity to give its thrust more legitimacy by correctly linking it to a long tradition. It is as if Mr. Ravi Dev, like Christopher Columbus, has now discovered this wonderful concept. Yet from Kwayana, to the Jagan-National Patriotic Front, to the WPA, to the PNC’s Lowe-Norton-McAllister-Trotman, to Clarence Ellis, to the SN and the New York-based Caribbean Daylight, this concept has been passionately and vigorously advocated in Guyana for the last 40 years”.

Now Ravi is furiously heading back to the future. Ravi now tells us “Africans and the African PNC should woo Indians and over time….perhaps by 2016, they would use the pernicious “winner-take-all” Westminster system to defeat the PPP and be in power. Dreams deferred in essence. How timely is his advice given what has happened overnight in Haiti? How retrograde when Guyanese are suffering and a great tidal wave could make us Haiti tomorrow since we have to have a national debate on moving the capital of Georgetown, an opportunity missed because of inadequate LCDS consultations. How strange, none of our politicians on all sides of the political spectrum are even addressing this significant issue or seeking ideas for job creation.

This is the Westminster system Ravi wants Guyana to continue to be ruled by until 2016. This is the racial morass, as long as “we in power” Ravi wants to leave this country in.

Where is Ravi’s commitment to shared governance which he acknowledged in his “transient and tactical’ embrace of a Government of National Unity just a few years ago?

Ravi’s hypocrisy is surpassed only by his intellectual “gong show” approach to the lives of ordinary Guyanese. He now states he wants to move “forward to the past”. I quote “From our informal surveys, the percentage of Indians in the population is now below 40%. The question in our present problem-space is therefore not how to deal with the obstacle an automatic built-in majority – or even a plurality.

The answer then, has to be different. I believe that it is the opposition’s own unwillingness to forge a strategy and build mobilization machinery that could deny the PPP a majority, rather than any inbuilt “ethnic censuses”, that is keeping the PPP in office. In such a scenario, even if the PPP at best secures the Presidency, they would need opposition support to govern”

In this new life, Ravi sees Guyana still being governed by a racist Westminster model. He still sees total racial voting. He has abandoned his Government of National Unity spiel. He now conveniently forgets that Guyana has an Executive President who has refused to sign more than 10 Bills passed in Parliament, some of which we unanimously approved.

In Ravi’s new scenario, “the PPP would win the Presidency but would need Parliament to govern”.

He also conveniently forgets the Executive Presidency lives above the Law , will appoint all Cabinet Ministers and can use the Consolidated Fund, the Petro Caribe Fund, drug money and all sorts of other constitutional and criminal illegalities like extra-judicial killings and fear, to rule with or without Parliamentary influence.

Indeed, Ravi has been transformed or has returned to his original vision about taking care of the Indian Security Dilemma. He has again turned his back on the African Security Dilemma. Age does this to grown men. So does spiritual ambiguity.

Ravi, be cool. Your answer to where you are politically and racially was given in your Sunday column, namely with these words: “How can an electoral system in a racially divided nation be ‘free and fair” when only one side can win because of an ethnic census?”

This is an exemplary instance of refusing to interrogate the present and to dwell only on the past. The “problem spaces” then and now are different: the questions to be posed must be different and therefore, so might be the answers”.

Ravi, the “problem spaces” then and now are not different. As a matter of fact, they are the same and the situation is more dire now than then.

The Westminster system is a destructive anti-human rights racially promulgated system of minority rule under the guise of majority rule. Any politician who wants to use this system to decide who governs Guyana is “a destructive anti-human rights non leader who is interested in him or herself and not the people of Guyana.

The ‘West Monster’ system must go. Leopards don’t change their spots.

Eric Phillips

 

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