The Final Solution for Indians?

Apr 18, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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On September 4th, 2002, after thirty-five Indians had been murdered, sixty-nine Indians critically wounded, forty-four Indian businesses had been attacked and robbed, twenty-nine vehicles of Indians had been hijacked in the wake of the February 2002 jailbreak, Stabroek News published a letter from Mr Abu Bakr. The depravities, he argued, were the inevitable consequence of “Indian racism”. The caption of the letter summarised Mr Bakr’s recommendation: “The Indian must also engage in self-examination.”
I mention the above because last week, Mr Bakr returned to his thesis in support of Mr Freddie Kissoon’s long running polemic about “the East Indian mind, (obviously incorrigibly warped since Indians are “horribly insensitive” and “the voices of Indians have become sickeningly dead”) the East Indian conscience (virtually also dead, since Mr Kissoon can find only eight Indians exhibiting this faculty – with only two residing in Guyana) and Guyana’s tragedy” ( a”vortex of insanity, nihilism and evil” all caused by the perfidious PPP – “the most corrupt, morally enfeebled and undemocratic political party in the history of the West Indies”.
The PPP, of course, is kept in office by these gutless Indians (Mr Kissoon could only find “two brave East Indians who have the courage to denounce authoritarianism” – he modestly excludes himself). These Indians, more importantly to the point made by Mr Bakr, are hopelessly racist: their “community practices a racially scorch (sic) earth policy against other ethnic groups”.
‘Back in 2002, Mr Kissoon seemed to approve of Mr Bakr’s “theory of inherent Indian racism” (he invoked his favoured but arguable claim that “Indian people in this country place more emphasis on skin colour than any other ethnic group”) but felt Bakr’s timing was wrong – in the midst of “a chain of unstoppable anti-Indian attacks which are taking on extreme pathological and sadistic complexions.”
After the killings were ended, Mr Kissoon obviously believes that it is now okay to daily castigate Indians for being racists and for being responsible for any and all problems that are encountered in this country – either directly or through their purported proxy, the PPP. Mr Kissoon would do well to reflect as to how those “unstoppable anti-Indian attacks” were stopped and ask whether we may not experience another one at any time because of the unstoppable incitement from provocateurs such as himself.
But I return to the idée fixe of Mr Bakr (as summarised by Mr Kissoon) that Indians are possessed of an “inherent” racism. In his recent letter, “There is a mindset that some want to deny”, Mr Bakr asserts what I believe few would argue with: “There is of course no doubt that Indo-Guyanese, like all Guyanese and indeed people everywhere, have a “mindset” or set of cultural reflexes generated from a matrix of values that of itself merits study and description.”
What I would argue against, and have done so in several past exchanges with Mr Bakr, is that the Indian “mindset”, especially as it concerns the subject under review, racism, is fixed and unchanging from his millennia-old experiences in India.
Mr Bakr alludes to an encounter with “Swami Aksharananda some years ago when I (Bakr) referred to what I (Bakr) perceived to be an Indian “mentality.” Let me refresh his mind (not mentality).What he actually claimed was that Indians have kept intact “notions of dharmic duty that have congealed into habit and mindset”. It was essentially a restatement of the Kean Gibson thesis, leading to in his present words, “collective moral development” that is “arrested”. Among the abominable “dharmic duties” is presumably, the anti-African racism that was unleashed by Indians in Guyana and which provoked what Mr Bakr described as a “like immorality” in Africans.
We have always denounced those that have claimed that the violence inflicted by some Africans on Indians from the sixties onwards in Guyana can be attributed to their allegedly endemic violent living conditions in Africa. We have pointed to their modern ethnic security dilemma in being locked out of the executive under a majoritorian political system.
Mr Bakr has never contested this thesis and by arguing that Africans have developed a “like immorality” from the behaviour of Indians also concedes them an historical ground for their actions. The Indian, however, in his immutable, possibly genetically-induced “dharmic duty”, acts outside of history. According to Mr Bakr: “It would be nonsensical… to source the said sentiment (“a bias in the group that led to the reflex vote for the PPP and the sentiments of racial solidarity that powers it”) in an ancestral terror born of their contact with blacks and the “security dilemma” it engendered.
Mr Bakr, and those whom he backs, steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that anti-African racism came out of a western discourse, embedded in the European Enlightenment that sought to justify the enslavement of Africans for their “New World” project. Indians, colonised from the seventeenth-century onwards, were also objects that were mentally enslaved by the hegemony of that discourse. We have contended that because of the success of the western hegemony, anti-African racism is a global phenomenon.
In Guyana, all groups have imbibed elements of this attitude – none more that the Coloured/Mulatto group that have historically done the most to oppress Africans. By wilfully eliding the actual sources of anti-African racism Mr Bakr cuts his nose to spoil his face. We have advocated programs especially in our public educational institutions to address this cancer in our society.
Finally, in locating anti-African racism as “inherent” to Indians, Mr Bakr’s argument leads ineluctably to the conclusion that for Guyana to be at peace, there can be no place for the Indian or his culture. It is a mirror-image of Mr Eusi Kwayana’s claim: there is no guilty race, but the Indians started the whole problem. Together with Mr Bakr’s cohort Mr Kissoon’s incredible claim that Indians own 99.99% of the businesses in Georgetown – even more than Hitler claimed for the Jews in Germany – is the next step going to be “the final solution”?

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