When religion becomes racism where is God?

May 01, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to Swami Aksharananda’s letter of April 28 ((“If Mr. Ramjattan wanted Indians to forget the PNC atrocities the least he could have done was to call for PNC accountability”)
I begin my reply by asserting my right to reject what Mr. Aksharananda says about himself. That is my right. I do not have to accept the claims people make for themselves. I do not have to concede that he is a Swami. In my replies to Juan Edghill when he served as chairman of the ERC, I did not recognize his status as an ordained Christian priest. I never accepted that there was an organization that does polling in Guyana named Nacta. I never recognized that Vishnu Bisram was a professional pollster.
In the same vein, I do not recognize Aksharananda as achieving the status of a Swami. I know him as Dr. Oudaipaul Singh. I have never enquired about his Swami status because I believed and still do that it is self-appointed. Aksharananda has a long history of pro-East Indian activities in and out of Guyana. He co-founded ROAR with Ravi Dev and campaigned for ROAR in national elections.
Since his letter in the newspapers in which he accused the AFC of involvement in the violence at Agricola, he has remained silent. Like Ravi Dev, I regard Asharananda as an Indian supremacist. His mind is filed with the ethnic problematic in Guyanese history and Guyanese sociology. In polemical essays on this problematic he passes off subjective opinions for scholarship. Ravi Dev does the same. Mr. Dev is now a full-time consultant with the Guyana Times. Last week, outside his Guyana Times office, I had a little encounter with him which will be described in a future missive.
Aksharananda’s letter accusing the AFC on incitement in the Agricola incident was poor research and came within his tradition of seeing every political issue in the binary of Indian Guyanese versus African Guyanese. His letter of April 28, 2015 in the Stabroek is particularly egregious for three reasons; one is his deliberate methodological evasion. The other is his historical distortions. The third is downright academic dishonesty.
I will elongate on these three characteristics bearing in mind space constraint. First, the academic deception aspect. It is my work to monitor general elections in important countries that generate the main currents in global dynamics. In American, British, and German elections, there have been no candidate or party that made a description of the past the theme of the campaign.
In mentioning Barack Obama and the return to the past in his letter, Aksharananda should know that in none of the two presidential elections he won, did Obama make a return to understanding the past an election theme. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazi era are never, I repeat never mentioned.
I am accusing Aksharananda of academic deception because he knew that the occasions in which he gave examples of a return to the past, these examples had nothing to do with general elections. For example, he mentioned China’s reminder to its people of Japanese war atrocities. China does not have competitive elections in which the Japanese memory would be a theme.
In relation to his methodological evasion, this is tied in to the academic deception factor. Ashsrananda knew that the controversy over educating Guyanese about the past is set within the context of the 2015 election competition. Ryhaan Shah, Dolly Hassan and others have not designed their argument about the past to fool anyone. They are clearly saying that in the current election campaign the young people need to know what the PNC Government did in Guyana. In unambiguous ways, they have emphasized the era of the PNC and have completely stayed away from any reference to post 1992.
Aksharananda to my mind, used Shah’s and Hassan’s PNC era thesis and took it out of context to say that people must know the past and he offered examples which have nothing to do with what Shah and Hassan are trying to do. In other words, he chooses a methodology that suits his purpose rather than helping Shah and Hassan with their flawed approach. But he knew Shah and Hassan are on weak ground with their convenient use of the past. So he takes the past out of the context to which he should have confined himself in the belief that he could strengthen Shah and Hassan.
Finally, Aksharananda’s history of Guyana is not my history. My country’s history is about atrocities committed by the PNC and PPP in the sixties. My country’s history is about the PNC’s atrocities in the seventies and eighties and the PPP fighting back with equal atrocities. My country’s history is Burnham in the sixties with help from the West fighting for power with Jagan with the help of the USSR and its allies fighting for power too.
My country’s history has never been good guy versus bad guy. I would like to remind Aksharananda that I have two degrees in history and both are on Guyana and I don’t see my country’s history the way he sees it. Finally, I believe scholars can validly argue that the concept of atrocity in the exercise of power applies equally to the PPP since 1999 as it does to the Burnham regime, 1968-1985.
Frederick Kissoon

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