The Jaganite faction is an indecent fiction

Jul 03, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

With the obliteration of the opportunity for Bharrat Jagdeo to be the presidential candidate for the PPP in 2020, there is mounting description in the media about guerrilla warfare in the PPP between a Jagdeoite cabal and Jaganite faction.
I find this debate sterile, because it is based on incredible ignorance of the shape of the PPP’s power since it formed the government in 1992. Its ignorance is unlimited for another reason – it has no intellectual content, not even an infinitesimal drop. Who or what is the Jaganite faction? Let us go back to the only genuine example of factional struggle inside a political party that had power – the Desmond Hoyte Government.
Hoyte, for a strange psychic reason that has never been explored by scholars, wanted to rid Guyana of all the characteristics of the Burnhamite epoch. Hoyte went so far as to approve of the arrest of one of the fulcrums of Burnhamite staying power – the head of the House of Israel. Opposing Hoyte was a Burnhamite faction headed by Hamilton Green, the Prime Minister.
Included in this group were ministers, diplomats and formidable apparatchiks inside the PNC. Two situations pitted the Hoytean team against the pro-Burnham faction – a pro-capitalist direction and the Jimmy Carter negotiations. The players in the pro-Burnham section made strong pronouncements against these two policy initiatives of President Hoyte. Some insiders from that period have written and talked about a violent conspiracy against President Hoyte by the rebellious faction.
After Jagdeo won the 2001 elections, he refused to be advised by Mrs. Jagan. The two even got into a public spat. From thereon, Mrs. Jagan quietly exited active politics inside her party and stayed away completely from governmental activism. The PPP as a party and the PPP government after 2001, were completely dominated by Bharrat Jagdeo. From 2001, no one in the PPP and in the Jagdeo government was identified as a Jaganite.
In fact, many of the protégés that Jagan literally nurtured had become converts of Bharrat Jagdeo. Names that were associated with the Jagan brand like Gail Teixeira, Indra Chandarpal, Komal Chand and Clement Rohee, among others, were happy to carry out the policies and ideologies of President Jagdeo.
Where was this Jaganite faction? In fact one of the most trusted lieutenants of Dr. and Mrs. Jagan, who literally grew up in the Jagans’ home was Kellawan Lall. President Jagdeo was the virtual protector of Mr. Lall. If there was any name in the PPP that was ideologically linked to the Jagans, it was Donald Ramotar. Yet Ramotar during the twelve years of the Jagdeo presidency never uttered one word or did even one thing as General Secretary that would have made scholars and activists refer to him as representing a Jaganite faction. Ramotar was literally picked by Jagdeo to be the 2011 presidential candidate. In what is now known as the Medvedev syndrome in Guyana, Ramotar’s presidency was Jagdeo’s de facto throne.
From the time Jagdeo won the general elections in 2001 to the time the PPP lost power, this society never saw the emergence inside the PPP, and its government, of a Jaganite faction. President Jagdeo fell out with Navin Chandarpal, but the quarrel was never a political one.
This columnist believes and knows that work ethics were at the centre of the disagreement between the two men. But despite their disagreement, Chandarpal admired Jagdeo, The former husband of Gail Teixeira, Fazal Khan (deceased) told me that Chandarpal told him over drinks at Natoo’s Bar that Jagdeo was a great leader, because he effectively demobilized the PNC.
Mr. Jagdeo was the cruel hegemonic messiah in the PPP and when he moved against people who belonged to the Civic Component like Dr. Henry Jeffrey and those close to Mrs. Jagan like Joseph O’Lall, there was no outbreak of factional anger.
We are now hearing of a Jaganite faction in the PPP. What we need to know is when it was born, what policy disagreements and political differences it had with Jagdeo since 2001. Who were its main protagonists?
These questions cannot be answered, because there has never been such a school of politicians inside the Jagdeo presidency and the three years (December 2011 – May 2015) of Ramotar’s tenure. For the period in which he ruled Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo literally moved away – by billions of miles (maybe trillions) – from Cheddi Jagan’s political economy and ideological fulcrums on which that political economy rested. The Jaganite faction is alive and well in the circus, not inside the PPP.

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The Jaganite faction is an indecent fiction

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