An old demon may be dying

Oct 05, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The People’s Parliament has composed a petition to present to the National Assembly when it reconvenes next week. Seeking to garner thousands of signatures, there is an energetic campaign to raise these numbers all over Guyana.
On Wednesday morning, four of us chose to take the bandwagon to Vreed-en-Hoop. The petition is asking for some fundamental changes in certain crucial sectors of Guyana’s social infrastructure.
Among them is the need to have local government elections as early as possible; changes in our tax system to make taxes more equitable in its application; lowering of VAT; investigation into NICIL, NCN, NIS; immediate reconstitution of the Integrity Commission; anti-corruption legislation; establishment of the constitutional commissions like the Human Rights Commission, Procurement Commission, etc.; repeal of the Broadcasting Act; and establishment of a national living income, among others.
Over a period of two hours and twenty minutes, in which most of that time was spent explaining the purpose of the exercise and chatting about things and problems in Guyana, the four of us collected 360 signatures. The bulk of these, given the ethnic make-up of Vreed-en-Hoop, were from East Indians. There were refusals, but overall the pattern was a willingness to sign. There were about four indecipherable writings, but the rest are names that can easily be read. For academic and political activists, the observation, opinion and analysis is that the PPP’s strength lies in a politically and psychologically imprisoned Indian population.
Many scholars who study Guyana’s political sociology (in fact, a majority) would admit that African protection of the PNC’s authoritarian government from 1968 to 1992 was looser, more unpredictable and less enduring than Indians’ embrace for and acceptance of the PPP’s oligarchic and tyrannical excesses. The explanation for this would cover an entire book manuscript, so it is virtually impossible to capture the arguments in a short newspaper column.
African attitudes toward the PNC Government and Indian perception of PPP rule can best be explained by the evolution of both the African and East Indian in this land, the point at which the post-Emancipation Africans and the post-Indentured Indians entered the economy of  British Guiana and the class character of both of them.
Briefly, the post-Emancipation African exposure to Christianity and Anglo-Saxon philosophical values (especially the role of the lodges in the life of the middle class African man) created a deeper sense of administrative mission and nationalist identity in Africans.
This tended to shape them in ways that would make them uncomfortable with administrative tyranny and power abuse. Christianity placed no small part in teaching its adherents of the redemptive value of propriety in public life. The Indians on the other hand were commercial and business people, unfamiliar with the purpose of marriage to the State and its inherent obligations. Absence of experience in working in the State system by Indians did not make for an understanding of how wrong it is to condone power excesses and financial venality.
After the 1997 death of Cheddi Jagan, Africans became annoyed with Indian silence on the PPP’s descent into dictatorship. For the average Indian, the PPP’s depravities were of less importance than keeping faith with an Indian government. This has been the pattern among Indians, with the PPP winning all five elections since 1992. The 2011 elections took place nineteen years after the PPP first came into the central administration, yet Indians rooted for the PPP. When you examine the 2011 results, almost 90 percent of the PPP votes came from Indian locations.
The 2011 results had its phenomenal dimensions, and this will lead me back to what I saw in Vreed-en-Hoop. Moses Nagamootoo beat the PPP badly in Region 6, with only 53 percent of voters visiting the ballot stations. It was bound to happen. Dictatorship’s worst enemy is time. The longer the autocrats stay in power, the easier it is to continue on a reign of terror and insane behavior, where irrationality and pomposity replace reason and reality. It is clear for all Guyanese to see that there is a gigantic inability inside the PPP to distinguish between reality and illusion.
After twenty years of unpopular politics, unprecedented incompetence and unimaginable corruption, the alienation of Indians is nearing completion. What I saw in Vreed-en-Hoop has led me to believe that a good, clean, strong Indian alternative can displace the PPP among Indians. I have no time frame for this completion, but the rejection feeling is there and is getting wider and deeper. It is my academic position that the era has arrived in Guyana where Indians have now opened up their prison door.

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