Class analysis of the Ravi Dev incident

Apr 19, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – In 34 years of newspaper columns, I cannot count the times I have laughed on the occasions in which I was criticised yet proven right; not just in passing but in ways in which the society can glaringly see for itself.
Columnists get their fair share of communication from others who want to engage them. I receive emails all of which unfortunately I cannot enter a dialogue with. There is this gentleman whose first name I will omit.
Mr. Bansgopaul writes me often and I did a response to him which cannot be reproduced here but if readers email me I will send them it if they are interested. Based on Mr. Bansgopaul’s persistent enquiry into the positions of Mr. Glenn Lall, I did a class analysis of the two newspapers – Kaieteur News and Stabroek News.
I honestly think it is a very plausible analysis which has not been done by any scholar in or out of Guyana but is the stuff that should be available to the public. In the near future, I will publicise these things maybe by my entry into social media. Here are the opening lines of my response to Mr. Bansgopaul; “I take all of your points but in life you have to look beneath the layers. There is where the meanings of life exist and you are better able to understand life.”
I believe in this country if you are going to understand major institutions like the media, the political establishment, civil society, prominent actors, etc, you have to use class analysis. This methodology is efficacious and allows you to see the invisible meaning of social phenomena.
I was able to satisfy Mr. Bansgopaul on the fundamental difference between the origin and nature of the two newspapers. Before I move on to the Ravi Dev incident and begin gloating on the many times my class analyses have been right, an important reflection is in order. Using class analysis, I have always argued in my academic work and in my life as a public intellectual that the PNC is a working class political party just as the PPP.
Mr. Dev complained that in his exchange with long serving WPA activist, Nigel Westmaas on the issue of ethnic politics, the Stabroek News edited out a very important line in his letter. When you read what that line contended, and you are familiar with class analysis, then you see the seminal value of class analysis in research in Guyanese society.
Here are the words, the removal of which Mr. Dev was not happy with; “Substituting Indian for Portuguese, the parallels with our present ethnic dilemma hopefully needs no belabouring.” Now context is everything in life so readers will need to see the context to understand (1) – Dev’s feeling about the omission and (2) – What was the Freudian meaning behind the deletion
Dev and Westmaas, who I consider the most ardent custodian of WPA’s political culture and history, had an exchange about the Angel Gabriel Riots (AGR) of 1856 in which Africans attacked Portuguese business places. That is the context. Why the omission of those words by Dev when the relevance of AGR may be a useful starting point to understand 21st century sociology in Guyana?
Dev also found it not too pleasing when Westmaas described Dev’s continuous emphasis over the problematic of Indian-African conflicts in Guyana as “Dev’s pet thesis.” Those words of Westmaas may be viewed as cynical when one takes into account the problematic is a serious part of Guyana’s scholarly enquiries.
I have known Nigel Westmaas as a little boy during my youthful days in politics. A member of the mullato ethnic community, he joined the WPA as a teenager. I was courting my future wife at the time and she became very fond of him. He was one of the WPA cadres that I became close to.
Let me repeat what I once wrote in one of my columns recently. Because of our friendship, I took the liberty of sending Nigel an email asking him to condemn the election rigging but he politely declined. Here are his exact words to me on March 14, 2022; “I guess my thoughts would be lost in the developing story.”
Anyway back to Dev. In deriding Nigel’s description of “pet thesis,” Dev observed; “I used, in 1995, my “pet theory” to predict violence by African Guyanese, which erupted on Jan 12, 1998 and continues for a decade.” Dev got his time-line wrong. A decade is 10 years. The violence’s last episode was as recent as September 2020 in Region Five where people were attacked, houses and vehicles were burned. The guardians of transparency and accountability were silent.
(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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Class analysis of the Ravi Dev incident

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