The reason African Guyanese intellectuals are afraid of the ESD topic

Mar 29, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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This country has produced top class African economists who can be found around the world in substantial positions. I recently ran into one of them at his father’s wake; Kwame James, the son of the late law professor, Rudy James. In fact, I shared student days at UG with many of these people.
Since the no-confidence vote, there has been a deluge of newspaper writings by East Indians on the ethnic security dilemma (ESD). But, there is a but. But the outpouring is coming from Guyanese Indian academics only, particularly three of them – Tarron Khemraj, Baytoram Ramharack and Ramesh Gampat. All live in the US. Strangely missing are the rebuttals from African Guyanese academics whether in or out of the land.
It is one thing to polemically confront the ESD from your perspective, but when it is done so crudely and vulgarly then scholarship is replaced by propaganda. All three names listed above are guilty of a systematic vulgarization of what the ESD debate is all about. With extreme brevity, let’s define the ESD from the perspective of the Indian Guyanese and the African Guyanese.
The Indians argue that there has to be balance in real power in Guyana between Africans and Indians. But power is not defined holistically or power is not deconstructed. Space will not permit further discussion, but by power, the ESD trio mentioned above – plus we have to throw in the famous Ravi Dev – mean essential, pure state authority. Indian ESD debaters want balance in governmental authority, the security forces, the civil service and the total public sector realm.
Indian polemicists do not factor in ownership of wealth in their definition of power. The African ESD debaters (who are invisible to date) have their perspective. This angle comes closer to a deconstructed version of power. It argues that you can only speak of ethnic balance in total in Guyana when there is balance in possession of wealth.
I am now accusing the Indian trio of Ramharack, Khemraj and Gampat of academic dishonesty. To prove their upgrading of their ethnic mentality over their scholarly mind, we have to quote them. Here is Ramharack; “There is a myth being peddled in Guyana that “95% of the country’s wealth is owned by Indians. Continuously repeating and legitimizing this myth as if it was an uncontested fact, only serves to galvanize greater antagonism towards Indians.”
Now there is serious infighting among the three ESD polemicists. Ramharack calls Indian predominance in the ownership of Guyana’s wealth, a myth. But Gampat and Khemraj take a more deceptive angle. Gampat says that such ownership is speculation (not a myth). And Khemraj says statistics for such a determination is not available. But Gampat, like Ramharack, wants to shut people up when they research ethnic ownership of wealth in Guyana by using the same mechanism. Let’s quote Gampat, “To assert that one ethnic group owns X percent of the country’s wealth is whipping up ethnic fury.”
What the three ESD advocates have done is to frighten African Guyanese scholars into debating the ESD from an African perspective. African Guyanese academics are afraid to summarize the substantial Indian presence in the economy of Guyana because they are afraid Indian people label them racist. On the other hand, when you look at the propaganda of the Indian trio, they couldn’t be bothered with charges of ethnic-based academia.
The Indian trio lives in the US where as economists, they know that a schoolboy can cite statistics to show the ethnic breakdown of wealth in the US. To research that is like researching how many times in a year you get snow. What the Indian ESD polemicists are afraid of is any mention of ethnic assets in Guyana, because it would weaken their case for balance in state power. They are afraid African Guyanese economists say, “yes we are for balance in state power, but we want balance in ownership of wealth”.
Gampat seems to be the most propagandistic of the Indian ESD fanatics. After claiming he has an overpowered mind, he put this overpowered mind in overdrive and it ran off the road and ended up in an ethnic ditch. Gampat, in looking at the ownership of wealth in Guyana, uses the category of what the state owns. This is pathetic nonsense. You cannot include that as a concept in determining ethnic ownership of wealth, since the state is public not private and the state is owned by every single Guyanese, so the Portuguese Guyanese have as much claim on state assets as other race groups. The ESD Indians will continue their distortions because they are writing as politicians not as academics.

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