Dev is conveniently engaging in outright lies and sensationalism

Sep 12, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to Mr. Ravi Dev’s column published in Kaieteur News, Sunday September 05, 2010, under the caption, “Political Hypocrisy”. In his column Dev stated, “It was for this reason that we broke with the WPA leadership in 1991, when they insisted that they had overcome “racial” voting, had the support of the majority of voters and demand that the PPP accept a minority position in a unified PCD slate…”
Over the years while respecting Mr. Dev political assertiveness, and at times forced to question his sincerity, I have had cause to publicly criticise his deliberate distortion of facts when it suits his purpose. When he made the statement that the WPA claimed to have overcome racial voting, he failed to cite the occasion or a person, when or to whom this ‘claim’ was made, or a document in support of his erroneous claim.
I don’t know where Mr. Dev got this idea which he attributed to the party. Prior to 1992, the only other elections the WPA was involved in were the 1985 General and Regional elections. That was another “rigged elections” and the WPA was given one parliamentary seat. At the time it was said that the party did extremely well, and we did believed so. At public meetings following the 1985 elections we used to cite the late President Hoyte’s post electoral declaration when he announced that the WPA must be “contained”. We said that Hoyte’s words confirmed the views expressed by those who counted the votes that the party did better in the elections than the results reflected which saw a single seat given to us. However, WPA had never laid claim to winning those elections, since it had no evidence to support such a claim. We did conclude that our doing well was based on multiracial support/voting. This is a far cry from saying the party had overcome the issue of racial voting on a national scale. I repeat, we never made such a claim.
Most of the WPA’s work post 1985 elections were directed at breaking down the race base politics that prevailed at the time. At the same time we worked to broaden and unite the opposition forces in the struggle against the regime. Most of this work was done before and during our participation in the PCD. The WPA would have had to be witless, since to make the claim that Dev attributed to us would have being counter productive to opposition unity.  Dr. Jagan and the PPP would not have reacted kindly to such an outrageous claim by the WPA and there would have been no PCD neither would there have been any anti-dictatorial mobilization.
Mr. Dev used 1991 as his reference point claiming not only that we said that we had overcome racial voting, but that we had “the support of the majority of voters and demanded that the PPP accept a minority position in a unified PCD slate.” This is yet another of Dev’s pieces of fiction, since the WPA never made such a demand. Dev, as he has done on several other occasions, is conveniently engaging, in outright lies, sensationalism and misrepresentation which underscore the extent of his deceitfulness.  I am not going to sit by and allow him to get away with his outrageous claims since he is not an ordinary letter writer, but he is in fact an Indian leader with tremendous influence in the Indian community. Dev, academic that he is, is well aware that he has a responsibility to support his contention with evidence. In the absence of him supplying supporting evidence to his accusations I am forced to ask if his preference is to indulge in kith and kin politics while pretending that his utterances are gospel truth. After the breakup of the PCD the PPP propaganda machinery had disseminated officially and unofficially, all sorts of lies on what had taken place in the PCD negotiations. Dev, who was not part of those discussions seems to be convinced that the Indian party’s version of what took place in those talks is correct. In spite of the evidence which contradicts the PPP’s views Dev, while not publicly recognising the PPP as his source of information, has undoubtedly adopted their positions as his own.
I had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of participating in all the formal sessions of the PCD’s negotiations on a consensus electoral slate for the 1992 elections. It could be said that I was the WPA’s permanent representative to that organisation. However, I was not part of the bilaterals that took place between PCD parties after the talks were deadlocked. A decision was taken that in an effort to narrow the existing differences, parties should have bilateral discussions. The understanding was that after those discussions the parties would have presented reformulated, revised or new proposals to the resumed formal discussions.
It is important to note that the bilateral were only intended to allow for creative thinking by the parties, and the testing of ideas on each others but not for binding decision making which was the purview of the formal meeting setting. I can say without fear of contradiction that the WPA never even ventured to make the claims Mr. Dev makes for us within the bilaterals.
The PPP after it had insisted on Dr. Jagan as the presidential candidate, whom the WPA had opposed, then submitted several other proposals based on their leader being the presidential candidate and allotted minimal share of the slate to the other parties in the PCD. The PPP’s proposals were based on its assessment of the electoral strength of each party. These proposals had reduced the other parties in the PCD to political insignificance. The WPA then made counter proposals which sought to reduce the PPP’s domination of the slate. We tried to force the PPP to concede more representation on the slate to the other parties as a block and not the WPA. None of the WPA proposals demanded (as Dev claimed) that the PPP accept a minority position. What we tried to do was to achieve something close to parity between the PPP and the other parties as a block in exchange for the WPA withdrawal of its opposition to Dr. Jagan’s presidential candidacy on the PCD’s list.
Finally, Ravi Dev will be well advised to follow the advice of former Harvard academic, Michael Ignatieff which he so contemptuously gave to Dr. David Hinds. Dev should urgently adopt Ignatieff’s thinking since his writings and utterances reflect the shortcomings he accuses others of possessing.
Tacuma Ogunseye

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