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PPP WAS THE MAIN BENEFICIARY OF RODNEY’S DEATH

Jun 18, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor,

On the occasion of the 36th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney I would like to briefly argue that the PPP was the main beneficiary of his death. In as much as Rodney was an obstacle to the PNC imposing the 1980 dictatorship Constitution he was also a very serious threat to the racial hegemony that the PPP enjoyed over Indo Guyanese who comprised the largest voting bloc by 1980. Dr Cheddi Jagan had since 1947 learned from Dr Jung Bahadur Singh that universal suffrage was inevitable and that who ever won the rural Indo Guyanese votes would win any future elections.
That truism stuck in Dr Jagan’s head and he saw the rural vote as the means to gaining power in British Guiana to advance his communist cause. To this end the PPP and all its arms were organized solely for the purpose of making Indo Guyanese its base. The social unrest of the early 1960’s, especially the Wismar violence of May 1964, served to concretise the Indo Guyanese vote as a PPP base unchallenged by no other party or leader. That is until Walter Rodney started to ground with sugar workers in the latter 1970’s.
The latter 1970’s saw the Afro Guyanese dominated Gov’t of Forbes Burnham come under severe pressure from Afro Guyanese intellectuals who were concentrated in the Working Peoples’ Alliance led by Dr Walter Rodney who advocated multi racial politics in the struggle to restore democracy to Guyana. While Dr Jagan and the PPP were reduced to holding small bottom house meetings in their strongholds, the WPA in general, and Dr Rodney in particular, held large public meetings in the sugar belt. Hundreds of Indo Guyanese would flock to Dr Rodney’s meetings. The PPP’s monopoly on Indo Guyanese was under threat. In Georgetown the WPA drew huge multi racial crowds. Both the PPP and PNC’s racial politics was under siege.
If the WPA had gained power the PPP would have lost its support base and its visions of a communist Guyana would have disappeared. The PPP responded by ordering its groups and arms to actively dissuade Indo Guyanese from participating in WPA activities. People were being told not to attend WPA meetings. While the WPA was calling for the removal of the PNC from power the PPP, guided by Marxist dogmas, gave Critical Support to the PNC and called for a National Front with that party. That position by the PPP caused it to lose much of its support base to the WPA. If the new culture of multi racial politics of Dr Rodney had succeeded then the PPP would have dwindled away. The physical destruction of Dr Rodney’s body came as a relief for the PPP.
I had cause to go to Freedom House on the morning of 14 th June 1980 and I found the PPP thugs loitering outside to be elated that Dr Rodney had died. They boasted that he had blown himself up. Inside Freedom House the “Marxist intellectuals” were labeling Dr Rodney as “an adventurist.” It is a matter of public records that the PNC and PPP held secret power sharing talks after Dr Rodey’s death. However Forbes Burnham died in 1985 and his successor Desmond Hoyte dismantled the socialist experiment and returned free and fair elections in 1992 affording the PPP the opportunity to finally replace the PNC in power. Of great significance is the fact that the PPP kept the 1980 constitution in place and it did not from a National Front Government with the PNC. In power for 23 years it made no effort at national reconciliation and continued with racial politics. All of this was possible because Walter Rodney’s multi racial politics was killed in 1980.
Malcolm Harripaul

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