Background to the Imbroglio

Apr 21, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

(We offer the following from our 1990 paper “For a New Political Culture”, as a background to the present debate on “anti-Indian resurgence”)

The potential for ethnic conflict in Guyana, or elsewhere, is stimulated when there are changes that cause one or more ethnic groups in a given society to feel threatened by other groups. Changes that affect the groups’ self worth, especially if they are structural and thus self-perpetuating and widespread, create the greatest potential for conflict. As in all group activities, the strategies employed by the leaders are key elements in determining the course of the conflict and these should also be examined. Political groups become politically functional only when individuals make them so.
Indians began to enter the “open” society in the 1920s following the end of indenture- ship. By this time they had ideologised their cultural markers and were ready to use them as mobilisation tools to end their peripherisation in the society. From the independent economic base they had constructed on rice and petty retailing, they entered the educational, professional, business and civil service fields in ever increasing numbers.
Changes, consequently were being generated in the upper stratum, where by the 1930s, the nascent Indian elite were competing with the African and Coloured elite. This competition for the same valued resources [high status jobs] might then explain conflict between the Indian and African elites, but cannot do so for the lower strata. Yet the latter have been most enthusiastic in support of their elites, contrary to their supposedly more rational and rewarding class interests, which would have dictated that they act in concert.
The point, however, is that when Indians begun moving into the middle class, the effect was to change the stratification pattern from one where class and ethnicity were coincident, to a cross-reticulated one where some East Indians could have had the opportunity of occupying higher strata. However, the unintended consequence was to challenge long-held notions of group worth, especially amongst the Coloureds and Africans.
The Coloureds, because of their 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. This conclusion was now threatened by the arrival of the Indian middle class, the political mobilisation of the East Indian masses by Cheddi Jagan in 1950, and the arrival of the universal franchise in 1953,.
Even by 1965, as documented by the International Commission of Jurists, Indians were still greatly under-represented in most key areas of the state sector, in relation to their proportion of the population. Relative to where they were just thirty years before, however, they had made tremendous progress – and at the expense of the Coloured and Africans. Africans had long been pacified by the relative openness of the class closure between them and the Coloured elite: they could enter the coloured ranks through education, lifestyle and money, which state jobs provided, while those who did not, could still aspire to it. Openness of class position kept the lower strata in line.
The “reticulated” stratification system created by the fifties, remains more or less in place to the present. In this situation, while within each ethnic segment there are class differences, the individuals occupying identical, objective class positions in different ethnic categories do not subjectively identify with each other – especially in relation to national power.
The discovery that the Indians were mastering the very skills long associated with the ruling class and in a manner more completely than themselves, compounded the indignities of the African slave heritage. The final insult was their elites advising them that they had to imitate the very qualities they had derided in the Indians, if they wanted to compete in the modern dispensation. Their group worth, and consequently the individual’s self worth, was threatened.
Compounding this psychological insecurity was the demographic factor: the Indians had a much greater birth rate than the Africans. Combining their newly acquired skills with an imminent majority of voters, in a political arena governed by majoritarian rules and universal suffrage, it was quite conceivable that the Indians could subordinate the Africans in perpetuity. Groups in this situation are overwhelmingly initiators of ethnic violence, as they project their anxiety and insecurity onto the other group who are seen as threats to their survival.
From this perspective, the response of the African Guyanese is not cultural; the same response has been elicited in culturally dissimilar groups such as the Malays who are in a structurally similar position economically in Malaysian society. Thus while Burnham, and the C.I.A. might have midwifed ethnic conflict in Guyana, they certainly did not create it. Any proposed solution to Guyana’s problem must address this fundamental fear of the African Guyanese; the fear of being swamped and subordinated.
The Indians and Amerindians, on the other hand, under the international norms of equality assert their right to participate in the body politic in proportion to their share of the population and their contribution to the country. Any proposal solution to Guyana’s problems must also address this integral experience of Indian and Amerindian Guyanese; the experience of being excluded from the corridors of power, especially political power.