Political Introspection

Dec 07, 2012 Editorial

Few persons would doubt that the electoral strategy of the PPP is of great import to all Guyanese. The first mass-based party in Guyana, the now 62-year-old party gave rise to its fervid competitor, the PNC, and together they dominated the country’s political history like colossuses. However, for the first time, an election produced a minority PPP Executive that is countered by an Opposition that controls a majority in the Legislature.
Against this unique background, Ralph Ramkarran, son of one of the founders of the PPP and a long-serving member of the highest offices in the party, recently offered an extensive analysis of “the reasons for the loss and to offer some ideas on how some of the issues can be addressed.” As with all things political, imputations of motives will certainly play a part in evaluating Mr Ramkarran’s critique and this is as it ought to be. Mr Ramkarran himself is of a school that believes that one’s opinions are influenced, if not constituted, by external ‘objective factors’.
Mr Ramkarran had profferred himself as one of the nominees for the PPP’s presidential candidacy, and had suggested a voting procedure at variance with what eventually prevailed. Relations with some of his colleagues became strained, but he later accepted being the PPP’s nominee for the Speaker of the National Assembly, which the party eventually lost. Mr Ramkarran resigned from the party and its Central Committee/Executive Committee after an evidently rancorous exchange with some other members.
In offering his analysis, Mr Ramkarran located himself with “those who are still inspired by the ideals of its founders”. Since he did not explicitly identify those ‘founders’, one can only assume that he is going beyond Dr Cheddi Jagan and Janet Jagan, to offer himself a wider array of views and ideologies than the canonical, orthodox Marxism of those two. This is significant when one considers the first ‘factor of a negative nature’ that Mr Ramkarran invokes: “Election and population statistics.”
Mr Ramkarran notes, with incontrovertible official census figures, the precipitous decline of the East Indian Guyanese population in the last three decades – from 51.93% in 1980 to 43.45% in 2002. Projecting from that data he estimates that this group has now dropped to approximately 39% of the total Guyanese population. He compares this decline with the static percentage of African Guyanese (30.82% in 1980 and 30.20% in 2002) and the increasing percentages of “Mixed Guyanese’ (11.16% in 1980 to 16.73% in 2002) and Amerindians (5.31% in 1980 to 9.16% in 2002).
These figures have been available to one and all, and in fact, had been pointed out by Mr Ramkarran several years ago. What is different this time around is the ex-Speaker’s comment on the significance of these figures: “The decline in support of the Party at the 2011 elections has been attributed mainly to poor organization. However, the historically low turnout at the 2006 and 2011 elections and the reducing Indian Guyanese population have not been addressed. The Party considers this kind of analysis too sensitive for public discourse; but it has not even been discussed internally.”
While still cryptic, the correlation between the declining Indian Guyanese population and the PPP’s declining votes at the polls is quite seismic for a party that has studiously avoided any admission of an ethnic base. The last time this was done by a senior party official was in 1957 by Dr Jagan himself, in absentia at the PPP’s Congress, following the split in the party by Forbes Burnham.
Dr Jagan admitted that most of the African members had followed Burnham out of the party and that the PPP had to now accept Indians who had been previously been scorned as ‘bourgeois’. Balram Singh Rai, for instance, who was placed to run against Eusi Kwayana (then Sidney King) later that year in East Demerara – and won – was one of those Indians. The PPP, in that election also rejected British Guiana joining the WI Federation.
It would be interesting to read the present PPP’s riposte to the identified declining base.

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