The Dominic Gaskin story: A curious inexplicability

Sep 07, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I am not a user of social media but I have been told by countless persons that there were bestial denunciations of people who spoke out against the March 2020 rigging on social media with each chastisement accompanied by ethnic swearing of the most evil kinds.
The mainstream media carried letters that were full of condemnations of those that said that the PPP/C won. But social media posting were ugly and uncivilised in their presentations. Four CARICOM personalities – Owen Arthur, Bruce Golding, Mia Mottley and Ralph Gonsalves were vilified in the most scandalous ways. Serving diplomats in Guyana at the time were abused in ways never before seen in the CARICOM region. See my column of Friday June 26, 2020, “Never in Guyana’s history has a diplomat been so personally insulted by a politician.”
Some of us, like this columnist, became an obsession by those whose minds were so grotesque that only one word best describes these people who wanted to saddle this country with permanent power. That word is evil. For the five months that Guyana and the world witnessed the miasmic minds on social media that were cussing down patriotic Guyanese, there was an enigma that has not been analysed by any scholar so far.
On July 17, 2020, while the assault on electoral democracy was still taking place, Mr. Dominic Gaskin, the son-in-law of David Granger and at the time a member of the AFC’s leadership, issued a statement whose potency equaled any other condemnation of election rigging.
What remains strange up to this day is that given the stridency of his rejection of election rigging, there was no attack from letters to the newspapers, within the leadership of the PNC and AFC and from the poisoned minds who travel on social media. Mr. Gaskin’s statement is two and a half pages; space constraints will not allow for even half of his emanation to be reproduced here. Here are some selected quotes.
1 -“The transparent recount process provides an accurate reflection of what is in those boxes, and also shows a glaring discrepancy between the votes in Region 4 boxes and the votes declared by Mr. Clairmont Mingo whose clumsy attempt to fraudulently alter the results in favour of the incumbent coalition.”
2 – “If it appears that the entire world is lined up against the APNU+AFC coalition, it is because the entire world, except the coalition and its supporters, knows that Mr. Mingo’s numbers were not the right numbers.”
3- “It is the failure of the incumbent to acknowledge Mingo’s unscrupulous act that has us where we are today.”
4 -“The votes in those ballot boxes, all of which have been deemed legally valid, show that the majority of Guyanese prefer a PPP/C government to an APNU+AFC government.”
These are stronger pronouncements than any of the four CARICOM personalities named above had made. Yet Mark Benschop and Rickford Burke on a radio programme with me said scandalous things about these people to the point where I objected to Benschop’s derogation of Mr. Golding using decibels that were excessive.
None of the PNC leaders, none of the AFC leaders has made to date a critical response to Mr. Gaskin. Freddie Kissoon is an obsession for Mark Benschop to the point that when he asked Adam Harris about something I wrote, Harris politely said that he hasn’t read any columns of mine since April 2020.
The racist surrogates have uttered no one word against the judgment of Gaskin. Scholars need to probe this curiosity. Here are some brief notes. One is inferiority complex. Mr. Gaskin is half White. He was born in Europe and belongs to the light-complexion middle class. Of course, this is not a critique of Mr. Gaskin’s class position. Just to repeat, it is a political/psychological reason why his brave and moral stance against election rigging did not result in nasty attacks on him.
There will be a certain kind of deference among dark-skinned Guyanese for people like Gaskin. One of the most interesting missing links in contemporary Guyanese history that not one Guyanese has touched on was the way Forbes Burnham saw the Portuguese duo of Miles Fitzpatrick and David DeCaires, co-founder of the Stabroek News.
Burnham would hurt Indians and Africans who said and wrote the same critical things about him and his government that Fitzpatrick and DeCaires published. But Burnham never ever penned or spoke a line of insult against these two men. Why? I think you know why. It is the same with Gaskin 50 years later. He was not to be touched. But Indians like Vishnu Bisram, Freddie Kissoon, Ryhaan Shah and Ravi Dev, we are Indians of course; an inferior species so why show his deference. We are easy targets for abuse.

(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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