Latest update February 2nd, 2025 8:30 AM
Jan 25, 2013 Letters
Dear Editor,
Please allow me to respond to Sultan Mohamed’s piece titled “Maxwell’s analysis of Ramkarran flawed” (KN, Jan 22, 2013). Mohamed was replying to my letter titled “Ramkarran fails to acknowledge that the PPP has become the PNC it so enduringly fears”.
I found Ramkarran’s piece outstandingly written but otherwise lacking. Ramkarran is capable of eminent analysis as his recent piece on the problems facing the PPP avail. Mohamed has a problem with this statement “Ramkarran states that fear of the PNC has predominantly shaped the PPP’s psyche. If Ramkarran asserts this is the case, it very likely is how the PPP hierarchy thinks in Freedom House.”
Is Mohamed trying to deny that Ramkarran who has been in the PPP for more than 30 years and who has been a PPP leader for decades and who has interacted with the current leadership of the PPP for a long time and who had undisputed access to the inner sanctum of the PPP for decades does not know the mindset, psyche, mentality and tendencies of the PPP leadership, estrangement or not? I do not intend to address Mohamed’s many ramblings, which lack logical continuity and often passing relevance to the primary issues in my article.
I stand by my statement that any party or group that lives in perpetual fear of another cannot rationalize or make informed decisions and will seriously expose and undermine itself as a result. The PPP and many of its supporters are trapped in an unhealthy paranoia and a cultural mental illness of fear of the PNC and what the PNC represents to them.
It is time we as a nation address this problem for the PPP will never do so. We cannot have a major group of leaders who hold the reins of power in this country governed by trepidation just like we cannot have an entire ethnic group largely dominated by fear. Fear always produces failed leadership.
It is time that the leadership of the largest ethnic group stop shrivelling and cowering in fear of a failed party that is supported primarily by a smaller ethnic group. It is unhealthy, psychically destructive and miasmic for any group to be confined in absolute fear.
It is even more despicable that that group and its leaders do virtually nothing to confront and fix that fear. Mohamed could dance and prance all over this fact as much as he wants but we have a serious problem in this country where an ethnic plurality psychologically behaves like an ethnic minority under siege and yet does nothing about it.
For the sake of this country’s future, the PPP must graduate from being held hostage by effete political pansies to real leaders willing to break the psyche of fear. If in 20 years the PPP leadership cannot overcome its ridiculous fear even when it held the reins of power, what good will it serve its supporters and its primary Indian constituency who are declining in numbers with every passing year and will lose power at some point in the future?
Mr. Mohamed must know that I do not care about the WPA and its betraying dinosaurs joining forces with the PNC/APNU just like I do not care about the PPP, PNC/APNU or the AFC. I care about Guyana. How does the gutlessness of the WPA leadership joining the PNC/APNU minimize the gutlessness of the PPP, a party that has actually held power and retains a presidency that gives incredible power?
What kind of fallacious reasoning is this when the much smaller WPA has given more blood and pain to the struggles against the PNC dictatorship than the PPP’s leadership (few exceptions like Moses Nagamootoo) barking behind fences?
Isn’t the PPP more cowardly to have that kind of power and do nothing to insulate its crippling fear? What has the PPP done with this incredible presidential power to fix its fear? Nothing, absolutely nothing. If you pursue and glorify racialized fear like the PPP did on the last election campaign, it signals cowardice to others.
Mohamed does not want to accept that a minority of Indians are less fearful of the PNC today than before. But this is fact and the election result confirmed it. I do not care for Mohamed’s selective pot shots at my article while refusing the address the bulk of its substance. I am taking this opportunity to start a debate on what Ramkarran has said about the PPP’s paralysis into catatonic fear of the PNC and its implications for not just Indians but all Guyanese. Has the PPP made its constituency and Guyanese in general better prepared to resist those things they fear if they ever materialize?
M. Maxwell
Feb 02, 2025
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