Keeping Hate Alive

May 13, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Returning to Guyana in 1988, I attempted to highlight the factors that promote the development of democracy in our country as opposed to those that retard it. While much of the writings were theoretical, they were grounded in surveys and polls that sought to include the perspective of ordinary Guyanese. The thesis that our politics was dominated by ethnic concerns did not find favour with most of the political elite – they would rather pretend that ‘all awe a one’ but yet exploit the ethnic divisions for political gain.
We predicted that unless we confront our divisions honestly, the ‘conflict over the conflict’ would inevitably translate into conflicts in the streets. We had crossed this Rubicon in the 1960s and the genie of violence could never be put back into the bottle if we refused to acknowledge the genie. Swept along, the tide of events that unfolded after ethnic riots in Georgetown saw hundreds of Indian Guyanese being beaten and otherwise brutalised by their African Guyanese compatriots on Jan 12, 1998, I experienced politics from the ‘inside’ as leader of ROAR from 2000 and as its MP between 2001-2006. That experience simply confirmed all we had feared as ‘outsiders’.
Since officially leaving politics in 2006, I have attempted to highlight one particular dangerous feature that channels us into conflict – the hate-filled rhetoric and narratives some politicians and activists deploy in expressing disagreement towards the status quo. Pointing out that unlike those that were agitating for the PPP to legislate themselves out of office by ‘changing the constitution for power sharing’, I proposed that it was up to the opposition to eschew the politics of protest and violence. The demographics had changed to ensure that no one ethnic group now had an absolute majority in Guyana. Only the politics of compromise that reached across ethnic boundaries could deliver political power.
The greatest barrier to this kind of politics was the presence in our society of a band of activists –within and without the organised political parties – who were stuck in the past and insisted on the politics of hate and confrontation. Two years ago, I wrote in ‘Discourse of Hate’, “While not denying the importance of structural features, discourses are most crucial because they sanction certain kinds of action and not others. In times of heightened tension and conflict, narratives and discourses link individual and group identity, producing a sense of intertwined fate among groups. When violence is in the air, the fears also include concern for physical security and fears of extinction of self, family, and the group and its culture. Political actions – and reactions – are therefore highly influenced by the dominant discourses circulating at any given time.”
After reviewing the meta-discourses that had shaped our political actions after the abolition of slavery to the new millennium, we pointed out:
“After 2006, the discourse was taken over and given a new twist by Mr Freddy Kissoon and some new entrants such as Mr Lincoln Lewis. The PPP – the “them/other” – was now defined as an “elected dictatorship” – the repository of all evil – and the Indians that mainly voted for them were given full responsibility for their actions. The new party, the AFC, which Mr Kissoon declared he now supported, was now the angelic “us”.
Mr. Kissoon, the AFC, Lewis and the PNC defined themselves as fighting for democracy, freedom of speech, justice, workers’ rights and presumably, motherhood (good qualities). In contrast, in virtually every speech and article about the PPP, they declared the PPP was “fascist” – Hitler, killer of 6 million Jews is invoked; was committing economic “genocide” against Africans –  invoking millions genocidally murdered in Rwanda and the Congo; perverted; corrupt, violent etc.
In this discourse, Guyana was in mortal conflict between good and evil and that evil was real, and must be opposed. Acutely entrenched in our historic binary socio-religious discourses of “us” and “them”, this kind of polemic serves to essentialize the PPP and their supporters as satanic and morally corrupt.
Critically, this framing locates evil in the nature of the PPP – and by extension, their supporters – , thereby stigmatizing a whole category of people. Not to mention putting them at risk in an atmosphere dominated by a discourse of “us” against “them” and a history of political violence. It is a compelling discourse and an act of demagoguery that vitiates the actions of the PPP and their supporters of any political content by de-contextualizing and de-historicizing them. They are simultaneously de-humanized and de-personalized.
What justification, ultimately, can be offered for ‘acts of evil’?  The wages of sin, I am told, is death. In other words, holding that the PPP and their supporters are by nature evil (and racist to boot) rather than ordinary people, it is not difficult to see how attacks against them can become normalized.”
Recent interventions by both Messrs Lewis and Kissoon, demonstrate that even though the last elections disproved all their stridencies about ‘elected dictatorship’, they are still intent on stoking the fires of hate that can lead us into violent conflict once again. (To be continued)

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