Background to the Present Imbroglio II

Jan 08, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

(This concludes the preface to my reply to those who claim that our ethnically-oriented voting is ipso facto “racist”.)

The tragic events at Ruimveldt, when 14 Indians and 1 African were killed while marching to Georgetown in protest, made the Colonisation scheme moot – but addressed, for the while, immediate concerns about the African Security Dilemma. While some such as Rodney and the PPP had hailed the “multiethnic” nature of the protest of 1924 at Ruimveldt, others such as Prof Clem Seecharan have a different perspective:
“The evidence suggests that the NPC (Negro Progress Convention) used its influence on Critchlow and the BGLU to capitalise on the grievances of predominantly Indian sugar workers on the East Bank Demerara in April 1924…. The disaster at Ruimveldt strengthened Indian fears of the motives of Black leaders.”
Indian support for the BGLU and Critchlow dried up after this tragedy and betrayal and there were no more strikes recorded in the sugar belt until four years later.
While the Colonisation scheme lapsed and the NPC faded, the Coloured and African elite continued to organize themselves in seeking to protect and increase their gains in the power relations. In the zero-sum arrangements of the political system (in 1928 the British had imposed a Crown Colony government on Guyana) this meant organising against Indians who were making comparatively rapid economic strides in the 1930’s.
The United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey out of the U.S. had formed several branches across Guyana by the thirties. The London-originated League of Coloured People (LCP) however, became the most established organisation and had the most impact in Guyana from the thirties up to the fifties. They were in the forefront to confront what was seen as Indian encroachment on the Coloured preserve during that time. In the words of Ashton Chase, “They were already envious of the economic strides the Indo-Guyanese had made and considered them a threat.”
The threat was not only felt economically, but politically: socially, the Indians were still seen as “backward”. “When power was gradually seen to be passing from the colonial government to local groups in Guyana, a process commencing in the 1930’s but not really getting under way until after WWII, a great deal of attention became focused on ethnic or racial associations. For the Africans the League of Coloured People provided this outlet while for the Indians the British Guiana East Indian Association, an organisation in existence since 1919, served to promote their interests.”
The Coloureds, because of their White forbears, preferential recruitment into the junior bureaucratic positions of the Civil Service and their greater emulation of ‘English culture’, had conferred legitimacy upon themselves as the inheritors of the colonial mantle, with all its pretensions and privileges. The African community had conceded this presumption, and in fact, buttressed it in seeking elevation of their status by entry into the Coloured section through marriage, education, lifestyle and money, which state jobs provided. The arrival of an Indian middle class in the late thirties; the enlargement of the franchise to include more Indians in 1947; the arrival of the universal franchise in 1953, and the political mobilization of the East Indian masses by Dr. Cheddi Jagan from 1950, threatened that presumption and precipitated the Ethnic Security Dilemma of the Africans.
The British Guiana Constitutional Commission (1954) noted that the Indians’, “very success…has begun to awaken fears in the African section …and it cannot be denied that since India received her independence in 1947 there has been a marked self-assertedness amongst Indians in British Guiana.” By 1950, with universal franchise on the horizon, this assertiveness included competing for political power by leveraging their demographic advantage to address their security concerns.
The potential for ethnic conflict, in Guyana or elsewhere, is stimulated when there are changes in the society that cause one or more ethnic groups in the given society to feel threatened by other groups. There were changes aplenty in the thirties and forties. Compounding this psychological insecurity was the demographic factor and the implications for participating in and eventually controlling the government: by the nineteen-forties, the East Indians had a much greater birth rate than Africans and Coloureds. Combining their newly acquired economic strides with an imminent majority of voters, in a political arena to be governed by majoritarian rule and universal suffrage, it was now quite clear to both Indian and African thinkers that as the leaders of the NPC had feared, the Indians could deny the Africans control of the Government in perpetuity.
This structural condition created what we have labelled the “Ethnic Security Dilemmas” in the both the African and Indian sections. For the African section, which felt that others who it had categorized as “backward” were bypassing it and that that group may also rule them in perpetuity under the rules of the political game; the situation was untenable. It was rational that Africans would utilize whatever resource would help to equalize the playing field. Their trump card would be their serendipitous domination of the armed forces – precipitating and maintaining the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma.