The thing David Granger gave East Indians in 2015

Dec 29, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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On more than one occasion, the Stabroek News has referred to the razor thin victory of the APNU-AFC coalition over the PPP. The analyst reading that is bound to conclude that the PPP nearly won. There are some mistakes in that conclusion. First, I think the coalition victory had more votes than what the official results showed. I wouldn’t say a substantial number but in riverain areas and distant enclaves where opposition activities are traditionally weak, there has been a long pattern of PPP electoral skullduggery. Unfortunately, over the decades the PNC, later APNU, has not been able to prove it. I know Aubrey Norton and Vincent Alexander are convinced of this pattern. But one has to concede that without a multi-party contest, the coalition should have come far above the fifty percent mark.
Secondly, the racist poison, Mr. Jagdeo unleashed was unsavoury and demented. One is sure he was not alone. While his deliveries consisted of open racist incitement at the rallies, the bottom house meetings were perhaps even deadlier.
If the gigantic race monster of the African president devouring the helpless Indian population was not invoked by Jagdeo and his acolytes in 2015, maybe the coalition would have taken in far more votes. But at the end of the day, the coalition didn’t hold its own because racist brew or no racist brew, the coalition should have been able to dent Jagdeo’s race baiting.
When we review the politics of 2015, no doubt the PPP’s ignominious fall from grace overshadows everything else, and I mean everything. But 2015 has neatly transplanted itself on the pages of Guyanese history because of those racist chants of Mr. Jagdeo.
Open exhortation of race has been an intimidating taboo in modern Guyanese politics. The most rabid African Guyanese politician who disdains Guyanese East Indians is going to scandalize Indians at his/her private party and in shuttered rooms but never in the open. No African politician ever went that far from the fifties onwards.
The same goes for the Indian politician who hates African Guyanese and wishes they never have a say in Guyana’s political economy. Indian politicians would say the most derogatory, mean-spirited things about Blacks in Guyana but it would be in small groups after church is over in the mosque or temple or at the wedding celebration over drinks and at the vicious bottom-house meetings, but never in public.
The irony of race-condemnation and race-baiting is that at a time when the two major ethnic communities were locked in violent competition in the sixties, PNC and PPP leaders were virtually scared of using racist vocabularies.
If you examine the newspapers from the first victory of the PPP in 1957 to the end of the violence in 1964, there is nothing near to what Mr. Jagdeo said in 2015 in relation to race. Despite its tempestuous rage over rigged election from 1968 to 1992, there is nothing you can find from the mouth of PPP leaders that was a cussing down of African Guyanese.
The simple fact was that public abuse of people’s ethnicity was taboo from the time the PPP spilt in the 1950s until Jagdeo’s 2015 election poison.
What came off the lips of Jagdeo never even slipped off the lips of Burnham, Jagan, Hamilton Green, Ptolemy Reid, Boysie Ramkarran, Reepu Daman Persaud, Janet Jagan, Desmond Hoyte, Robert Corbin, among others. They simply did not have the inviting environment to preach race openly.
Now mind you, the emphasis is on the adverb, “openly.” Jagdeo broke out of that self-imposed jail in May 2015. That year has gone down as the year of the worst race- incitement in the history of this country. I could understand an educated Indian eulogizing the mythical talent of Jagdeo, but it numbs the mind to see Indian intellectuals supporting a politician who was encouraging the expansion of racist venom in 2015.
In this context, I lost all my admiration for Swami Aksharananda.
One can say that 2015 belonged to David Granger. He showed the East Indian race in Guyana that it was wrong about Black politicians; that the stereotype of Black leaders calling for blood against Indians was a figment in their minds, planted by Indian politicians from the PPP.
The 2015 general elections should have opened up the eyes of all Indians. It wasn’t the Black man running for president that was manufacturing racist morbidities that threatened the fabric of Guyana, but an Indian leader who served as President for twelve years.
Whatever analysis we put to the significance of 2015, two motifs stand out – Jagdeo unmatched infamy and Granger’s moral example that he gave the Indians of this land.

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