A supporter takes issue with an anti-Burnham letter

Aug 13, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Please allow me the space in the letter columns to respond to Mr. GHK Lall’s letter titled “Mr. Burnham trampled on social cohesion, national unity,” This letter appeared in the media as a response to President Granger’s August 8, 2016; letter. There is no need for me to engage in hyperbolic utterances or angst to refute the points of glaring classism, revisionist history, and the unloading of the yoke on one ethnicity’s neck to mend/ bend the social/political divide further.
First, I will agree with Mr. Lall that late President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham was an intellectual giant our country is yet to be blessed with since. He was a great personality, and statesman who is a much maligned one (which Mr. Lall has also contributed to in his missive.). Mr. Burnham was as perfect as we all are, in that his flaws are no greater than the rest of ours, and being Chief Executive of a nation does mean one must be without human flaws and error. With that said, we should not burden his legacy with unaccomplished tasks we think he should have piloted.
Second, this is my first analysis of Mr. Lall’s response to President Granger. In the third paragraph of his missive, Mr. Lall subliminally suggested that Mr. Burnham was at the fore of social disturbances but yet provided no evidence of this. His attempt to link Mr. Burnham to social disturbance born out of a period of ethnic division pioneered by the People Progressive Party and which lead to that body splitting and the birthing the People’s National Congress, has been part of the normative narrative to demonize Mr. Burnham beyond his human frailties. Mr. Burnham’s formation of the PNC out of that split (which included many others of other ethnicities with likewise minds) was in an attempt not to see the ethnicity to which he belonged to and others, become marginalized (as we witnessed for 23 years with the ascension of the PPP/C) but to be addressed.
Mr. Burnham recognized that Dr. Jagan had mortally become addicted to the numeric game calculating that because Indo-Guyanese represented a large majority of the citizenry, meant the PPP should win all elections and this is where the claims of “rigging” began. Dr. Jagan and his scion- progenies (to some degree Mr. Lall qualifies) believe in that ethnic equation and felt that all Indo-Guyanese would blindly vote ethnically and thus hand them victory eternal. It is the same logic that is applied to today’s politics where the descendants of that silly logic feel they should win every election base on a numeric equation that does not take into consideration the independent thought and will of the individual. This group- think has poisoned our politics and Mr. Burnham, in the mind of many, has been condemned to bear the blame for it when he is not even vaguely responsible.
In that same paragraph, Mr. Lall spoke of unbridled hatred that was unleashed on the society at large that rendered Guyana a place of mayhem if we are to believe him. As he put it “The distrust, antagonisms, and in many cases hatreds were all there, be it in the public service, or law enforcement operations, or community relations, or jobs, or business routines, among other things and places. The deep lingering agonies were there, too. All of these sentiments were there in full undisguised configurations.”
I have heard of this narrative of antagonism, hatred, and other unhealthy social evils, always spewed by those with a devise racist agenda, but as a boy growing up in the 1970s and 1980s before emigrating, I never witnessed them. But, Mr. GHK Lall speaks, as if an authority on this supposed ignoble stage of our history. My parents, who have imparted much of their experiences to my siblings and me, never spoke of Guyana in that context Mr. Lall wants us to buy. But I have experienced both the obscene, explicit and equally subtle, suggestive and implicit racism of self proclaimed intellectuals and opinion leaders. I have come to learn that an education is not a sure prophylactic against racism, overt or covert, or otherwise.
Third, Mr. Lall’s emotions got the better of him for what should have been a detail and promising debunking of President Granger, turned into the well test narrative that it is the responsibility of the Afro-Guyanese to build bridges towards peace. This indictment is represented in the following quote “Mr. Burnham did not move assertively and aggressively (as he is wont to do) to diminish and derail a seething situation on either side of the cleavage.  By my thinking, he should have reached out commandingly to his supporters first to tone down, to be more inclusive, and to be more nationally minded, instead of the rigid tribalism that became the order of the day. In the same vein, he did very little (other than the sometimes majestic and now famed public utterances) to assuage and overcome the vehement resistance and pervasive reluctance of Indians to meet him halfway, or part of the way for that matter.” (unquote)
Mr. Lall called this the “crux” basically summing up Mr. Burnham’s full life as a failure due to a perceived notion that he had to bend over in all directions to appease a segment of the population that was being breast fed, spoon fed and force feed a narrative of division painting Blacks as nothing more than their mortal enemy and even criminal.  His most honest comment in this missive is when he rightfully pointed out that Indians were bitter. He failed to demonstrate that their “bitter” attitude stemmed entirely from the lies peddled by the leaders of the PPP which had them believing that Mr. Burnham represent the embodiment of evil and this can be trickled down the rest of his ethnicity.
Tyrone Talbot
Editor’s note; because of its length, this letter will conclude in a forthcoming edition

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