Distorting the effects of the ban for ethnic gains

Jun 17, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
I would not dream of giving an English lesson to Ravi Dev, and that is why I am so surprised that, like Vishnu Bisram, that he too conjures up meaning in my letters that do not exist. In no part of my letter did I assert that Hindus did not suffer from the banning of flour and other food products during the period when such banning went into effect.
I would challenge both Dev and Bisram to produce any phrase, assertion or group words in my previous letters, that led them to this conclusion.
Vishnu Bisram advanced the argument that the banning of flour, potatoes et al was designed to affect the dietary habits of Indians. I presented arguments and evidence that renders that allegation absurd. Here we are examining design as opposed to consequence. The consequence of the banning affected Hindus, Muslims, Christians, agnostics, and every other Guyanese group for whom those products were staples of their dietary habits. In Bisram’s initial letter he claimed that Burnham banned roti. Well there was no banning of roti if my memory serves me right. So it is either that Bisram was playing the ethnic card, or he was contending that the vast majority of flour that was imported during that period was used in the production of roti. Surely, in a nation where the vast majority of flour products produced and sold commercially was, inarguably, bread and a vast assortment of cakes and other confectionaries, an argument that the effect of the banning of that product was confined to one segment of the population is ludicrous.
And that was the central point in my letters. It was not that Hindus were not affected by the banning of those products. It was that every group who depended on the products of flour was just as much affected by its disappearance from their tables as our Hindu brothers and sisters. What block of understanding prevents this simple construction from becoming clear?
Bisram asserted that Burnham banned dhal. Again we see the ethnic selective slant he gives to the banning of split peas. Split peas was as much a staple of the dietary habits of African Guyanese as it was for their Hindu brothers and sisters.
What narrowness of thinking allows anyone to confine the usage of this food product to only his ethnic community? He wrote that Burnham banned dhal! He is thus constricting the food products of split peas exclusively to the making of dhal. And even further, he is ignoring the fact that dhal, along with other tasty ethnic foods that came to Guyana with the indentured, had migrated across cultures into the dietary habits and taste buds of most Guyanese.
I have great regard for the keenness and astuteness of Ravi Dev. We are poles apart on many issues, social and political. Still, I am astounded that he would buy into an analogous argument that if a bucket of water was thrown out of an apartment window and drenched ten people of diverse ethnicities standing on the pavement below, a conclusion that it was intended to drown only five or six of such persons would be lucid, especially when the individual forming that conclusion continuously expresses a view that the person who threw out the water was favorably disposed to the other four or five persons standing below.
Bisram cannot have his cake and want to eat it too.
Ravi Dev infuses the aspect of Hindu religion into the adversarial effects of the banning of flour. I would remind him that wheat and bread also have important Christian religious association. Jesus is said to have fed a multitude with five bread and two fishes.
To break bread with someone, in Christian connotation, mean to make peace, to come together. In John 6:51 Jesus proclaimed to his followers, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread: he shall live forever”. This proclamation has become a religious communal ritual for many Christian denominations.
My reference to this is not to diminish Ravi Dev’s religious association of flour and Hinduism. My reference is to point out, again, that like usage of some of these food products as dietary staples of Guyanese, religious association with some of them is not exclusive to one group.
Robin Williams

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Distorting the effects of the ban for ethnic gains

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