Mike McCormack, Moses Bhagwan, et al: The psyche can lose its reason

May 20, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Here is a little story about someone I had the greatest respect for and the March 2020 election rigging had destroyed my respect for him. I refer to Moses Bhagwan, 85 years of age, who has lived in the US a long time now.

In a column on Moses Nagamootoo, nearing the end of the article, I referred to Moses Nagamootoo as Moses Bhagwan. Of course, anyone reading the column would know it was a typo error since the entire commentary was on Nagamootoo.

I got an email from Bhagwan asking me to publicly correct it. I don’t know why he sent it because it did not make sense. If you are writing an article on Michael Jackson and inadvertently referred to him as Michael Jordan, the basketball icon, then the 10-year-old will know it was a mistake. Bhagwan wanted to me publish the correction.

I honestly forgot (obviously such a tiny thing you would forget). But Bhagwan sent a reminder. I wrote back saying I would do it and forgot again. Now read about the attitude of this same gentleman to what GECOM’s APNU Commissioner, Desmond Trotman, wrote about him.

Trotman in “bigging” up his sycophantic role in GECOM in a letter in the newspapers on June 24, 2020, described his behavioural output during the five-month election drama (March to July 2020) as actions on his part which his WPA colleagues would appreciate. He named Walter Rodney, Moses Bhagwan, Dr. Nigel Westmaas and others of their ilk.

In other words, Trotman was boldly and barefacedly telling Bhagwan and others that the outrageous things that the APNU commissioners were doing in support of election rigging people like Bhagwan would understand. I emailed Bhagwan right away and told him he needed to respond to this madness from Trotman. He refused and never published his reaction to what Trotman wrote. Why?

To understand Bhagwan’s attitude one has to look to a similar deportment, for example Mike McCormack, the permanent head of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA). One must go back to the volatile environment of the seventies when the anti-dictatorship struggle was phenomenally energetic and looked likely to remove President Burnham.

In the seventies, the PPP was virtually pushed into the background by a relentless social movement that included the Catholic Church, Anglican Church, the Bar Association, the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement, which comprised the professional classes, notably UG academics, the trade union movement, particularly the university’s union, the WPA, Paul Tennassee’s Democratic Labour Movement, the GHRA, the business community, among others.

In this multi-class, multi-ethnic conglomeration, it would not be misleading to say that the PPP and Cheddi Jagan did not have a hegemonic role. If there was an outstanding catalyst in the dynamic movement of the seventies, then it would be Walter Rodney.

There were severe causalities – Father Darke and Rodney were murdered. Dr. Josh Ramsammy was shot through the lungs. Ohene Koama was killed by a police trap. Tacuma Ogunseye and David Hinds were jailed for three years each. Moses Bhagwan was beaten and jailed for printing the WPA’s organ, “Dayclean.” This is just a sample of what the seventies produced.

Then came the 1992 elections. The PPP won and the dialectics destroyed the flowers of the seventies. This poly-class, poly-ethnic social movement and the PPP had serious issues. Many of the actors like McCormack, Bhagwan, WPA personnel especially Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas, felt that power should have been more representative since the dialectics that brought about in 1992 was not of the PPP’s doing alone.

People like Bhagwan, McCormack, Eusi Kwayana and so many of the actors from the seventies cultivated an undying dislike for the PPP. In many instances, an anti-PPP position took on shades of anti-Guyana attitude. I think the survivors of the WPA from the seventies, particularly eight of them – Kwayana, Thomas, Roopnaraine, Joycelyn Dow, Bhagwan, Bonita Bone, and Karen DeSouza and Ogunseye – began to internalise a hatred for the PPP. Strangely enough, David Hinds was not in this category and had a far more enlightened perspective. He was anti-PPP but it never became anti-Guyana until March last year. Andaiye stood as a giant among this group as the one with an almost purest praxis.

The first indication of an anti-PPP orientation morphing into an anti-Guyana mind was the “Buxton Mayhem.” The WPA supported the rampaging criminals in the hope they would topple the Jagdeo presidency. Then came March 2020. For these persons mentioned above, the election was not about Guyana. It was about stopping the PPP from having power again. In siding with rigged election, they became enemies of the Guyanese people.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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