Dr. Keith Carter may have keratoconus like his uncle did

Feb 18, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – I read a letter in yesterday’s newspapers by Dr. Keith Carter, son of famous Guyanese, Martin Carter (I am doing an iconoclastic essay on the anti-Indian racism of the Creole middle-class in the nationalist movement including Martin and others like Rory Westmaas).
I mean no insult to Dr. Carter but he appeared as a figure of fun to me because while he was attributing the affliction of keratoconus to others, it looks like Dr. Carter may have a severe form of the problem which he, Carter described as short-sightedness.
Apart from that dimension of his letter which caused me to laugh, there is the Christopher Columbus aspect of it. His letter appears to be a subtle reference to the suspension of parliamentarian, Sherod Duncan by the Speaker.
Dr. Carter in his letter noted: “… based on reports in the newspapers of events in Guyana, it appears that these days, there are no principles, either personal or public, for which one can be suspended or expelled from some organisation….” It appears to me that this is in relation to Sherod Duncan, a citizen I feel is unfit to be a parliamentarian but maybe Dr. Carter sees things otherwise; that is the right of Dr. Carter.
Dr. Carter comes across to me to be a Christopher Columbus. Or is it possible that he was living in far-away lands and did not know when the following occurred:
1 – For voting based on his conscious, Member of Parliament, Charrandass Persaud was expelled from the Alliance For Change. Dr. Carter noted that his uncle, who was suspended from the PPP in 1956, said he was proud at being suspended for his principles. Charandass (a personal friend of mine) told me he was proud to be expelled for his principles. It would be nice to hear Dr. Carter’s opinion on Charran.
2 – The blatant disregard for the constitution in a no-confidence vote (NCV) in which not only was the required national election not held after three months of the NCV but the Caribbean Court of Appeal was asked to rule that the NCV was not valid because in a vote of a 65-member House, 34 not 33 is a majority. Dr. Carter had to do mathematics as a requirement to enter medical school. Can he tell us if 34 is a majority of 65?
3 – The obnoxious contempt for the rule of law when the Chief Justice’s ruling was ignored and the world laughed at Guyana when the results of a general election was declared by the returning officer using a smelly bed sheet, a piece of corrugated cardboard and a defective projector to post the results.
4 – Post-election violence in Region 5 instigated by the losing party in which all the victims were Indians including teenage girls and aging grandmothers. Now this particular incident should have preoccupied the mind of Dr. Carter.
He knows about the violence on Black Friday in 1962 Georgetown in which hundreds of Indian citizens were beaten with a few fatalities. Dr. Carter informed us he went to the Georgetown Hospital to visit his uncle who was a victim of Black Friday violence. I wonder if while visiting his short-sighted uncle in 1962, it ever crossed the mind of Dr. Carter that he could develop the same affliction in the future.
I end my discussion on Dr. Carter here and return to two themes that are present in several of my columns since the rigging of the 2020 election began on March 3. First, I predicted that in some quarters, there will be the manifestation of barefacedness in which the voices of reticence during five months of attempts to guillotine the legal election results will find the fountain of atomic energy and start criticising the new government.
This has been happening since the swearing in of Dr. Irfaan Ali on August 2, 2020. I predicted with incredible accuracy that the middle-class run weekly column in the Stabroek News titled: “In The Diaspora” that never commented on the NCV and the five-month election saga will suddenly find reason to criticise governmental behaviour.
The second theme is an analysis of the Creole middle class in the modern history of Guyana. I postulated that the attitude of the Creole middle-class to the election rigging of 2020 was the manifestation of an atavistic return to the early 20th century where East Indians in Guyana were looked upon as unfit to hold public office. I am engaged in research that makes me think that Dr. Carter’s father, Martin, his uncle Keith and their Creole colleagues had a problem with Indian leadership of the PPP not Cheddi Jagan’s ideology.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

---