More revisionism, more truths: Guyana’s history becomes richer

Feb 13, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I suppose one of the reasons why I am the centre of attacks by PPP cadres whenever I pen revisionist interpretations of the long career of Dr. Jagan is because the nature of my writings (newspaper commentary) reaches the ordinary person and the average young mind.
Such categories of persons may have never seen some devastating critiques of Dr. Jagan’s politics because these books are on shelves that the average person has no access to. Three such books come to kind. There is Clem Seecharan’s,”Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer.”
Then you have, Baytoram Ramharack’s Against the Grain: The Politics of Balram Sigh Rai. And Frank Birbalsingh, “The PPP: An Oral History, 1950-1992.”
In each of these books, the exposure of the Jagan’s self-destructive instincts, conspiracies, selfish politics and cruel and insensitive exploitation of the Indian community are laid bare. Some of the commentaries are harsh and condemnatory but evidential with many of the evaluators having no axe to grind like one of the Caribbean’s intellectual giants, Lloyd Best.
He painted Jagan as a weak leader manipulated like a toy by the real power-broker in the PPP, Mrs. Jagan. Many of the analysts and academics mentioned in these books are not known to the ordinary East Indian who thinks Dr. Jagan was a Guyanese hero
When I write about Dr. Jagan, the fulminations from his admirers pour in against me even though I quote the works of people who have the proof of Jagan’s wrongdoings. On two occasions, I responded to letters in the press by Dr. Henry Jeffrey in which I demanded that Jeffrey, instead of treating with all types of political issues, tell the Guyanese people about the Civic Component of which he was supposed to be a part.
Let us see how recent revelations of Dr. Henry Jeffrey will be dealt with. Would Freddie Kissoon be called a Jagan hater or will the vexed pens concentrate on Dr. Jeffrey’s judgments?
Dr. Jeffrey’s observation on the nature of the Civic Component puts Dr. Jagan’s politics in a new light. According to Jeffrey, there was never a legal and physical entity named the Civic Component. He went on to state that there were episodic (my word) attempts to concretize the Civic Component into a livable (again, my word) entity so that it could have had an agenda that could have been presented to the PPP. Such efforts were never transformed into reality.
There are countless occasions in Guyana and in different parts of the world where Dr. Jagan told his interviewers and his audiences that the PPP was sharing power with other classes in society through the Civic Component. There are numerous occasions in which Dr. Jagan described his government as a coalition. This was not a truthful statement.
The Guyana Government from 1992 was not a coalition. Dr. Jagan could not have been that unwise or even unlearned not to know what a coalition meant. It denotes government of partnership made up of different organizations. There is no other interpretation to this approach.
Coalition government is a common type that has been around a long, long time.
Dr. Jagan knew fully well that his party was not made up of two organizations, the PPP and the Civic Component and that policy output was not as a result of mutual acceptance of two agendas. Dr. Jeffrey was unambiguous when he observed that the Civic Component never tabled its manifesto to the PPP because there was never such a thing. Although Dr. Jeffrey didn’t state it, the public knew that the Civic Component was made up only of individuals who related to the PPP as individuals and who took instructions from the PPP and implemented what the PPP wanted
What Dr. Jagan did is that he invited a number of persons to join the PPP’s slate for the 1992 elections. When the PPP won, some of these new faces became Ministers, some were put on state boards. They subsumed themselves under the rubric of the PPP and they carried out the policies of Dr. Jagan and Freedom House.
For Dr. Jagan to refer to that amorphous and ephemeral shape as coalition government is stretching the truth a long, long way.
I sat next to a “leader” in the Civic Component at the wake of my uncle, Dr. Leslie Mootoo. I asked him about the Civic Component’s role in Government, Dr. Hughley Hanoman asked me; “Which role are you talking about?”
Despite Dr. Jeffrey’s statements, the guards, old and new in Freedom House and in the Government, will still continue to echo Dr. Jagan’s deception.

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More revisionism, more truths: Guyana’s history becomes richer

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