Guyanese East Indians must understand the logics of Walter Rodney

Jun 01, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Dr. Randy Persaud and Ravi Dev have an undying theme. If other East Indians do not vigorously denounce the dangerously misleading advocacy of these two men (there are others but these two write frequently, with Dev having a weekly column,) young Indian minds might digest their sociological venom, and poisonous it is indeed.
The theme of Persaud and Dev is that certain personalities in Guyana are attacking the Indians of this land and when taken together, this constitutes incitement. Both gentlemen think that the analyses of these Guyanese personalities are not intellectual interpretations of current trends in Guyanese politics but anti- Indian propaganda.
When the writings of Persaud and Dev are stripped bare, then you see the intentions behind their pursuit. Their motive is to turn victim into aggressor, to obfuscate state racism, state incitement against other ethnic groups, state terrorism. The purpose of this perverted journey is to retain PPP hegemony in Guyana. Read that to mean East Indian domination.
I have not missed and do not intend to miss an opportunity to reply to Dev. Now Persaud joins Dev in his quest to paint the plausible and valid theorising of Guyanese anti-fascist commentators as anti-Indian racism.
I am singled out, of course, because unlike Christopher Ram, Rupert Roopnaraine, Moses Bhagwan, Malcolm Harripaul, Tarron Khemraj, Arif Bulkan, Janet Bulkan, Jinnah Rahaman and Churamanie Bissundyal among others, I do a daily commentary with a newspaper that has national circulation at home and abroad.
These two men have targeted my anti-fascist indictments of the Jagdeo regime because I have frequency and incessancy. Randy Persaud’s latest salvo is contained in last Sunday’s letter section of this newspaper.
Here is a most shocking statement by a man who is the advisor to the President of the country. After quoting it, I will then contextualise it within the framework of world culture.
Persaud writes of me; “Kissoon (has carried) out vicious attacks against his culture (Kissoon’s own culture) under various guises such as the East Indian mind.”
Put what Persaud writes in an international context then it means that white Americans turned their backs on their own race when they voted for Obama. It means that Jews will betray their race if they ask for a separate Palestinian state. Persaud and Dev are evanescently clear – Kissoon is an East Indian who is attacking his own race. Dev has written about that umpteen times.
Now Persaud puts it another way – I am attacking my own culture.  I have heard with my own ears how some African Guyanese have reacted to this cultural conceptualisation of people like Dev and Persaud. It goes like this – “We, Africans should not have pressured Burnham and weakened him; he was one of our own. Look how the Indians are supporting the fascism of the PPP Government.”
What do you say to such reaction? Is it not a logical reflection of African Guyanese? Tom Dalgetty, who supported the WPA against Burnham, wrote in the Stabroek News a few years ago that looking back now, it was wrong for Walter Rodney to have confronted Burnham.
We were both presenters in the same panel at an academic conference and Dalgetty asked his audience what was all the fuss about rigged election under the PNC. He then argued that there are rigged elections all over the world.
I know Tom very well and I believe his intonations are a result of the barefaced advocacies of people like Persaud and Dev.
Missing from the presentations of Dev and Persaud are the inciting statements against African Guyanese from a host of PPP leaders including those at the top of the power pyramid, and racist policies against African Guyanese public sector workers.
East Indians who support the present fascist government in this land must remember how Rodney freed PPP member Arnold Rampersaud from the gallows. Rodney told the all-Black jury that President Burnham humiliated Black people by getting them to go to court and sin their conscience the way the white slave-master treated Africans on the plantation.
Guyanese East Indians must understand that African Guyanese are not goats and cows that will sit like slaves and be humiliated when their leaders are vilified and their fellow Africans are discriminated against. The two races are intricately bound up with each other. If the Guyana Government is going to drive Africans into the ground, then the consequences will be extensive instabilities, a drowning vortex that will take all of us down.
Indians must always remember the logics of Walter Rodney. They must not let the PPP regime use them to hurt another race.

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