The feeling and theory of Priya Manickchand

Aug 11, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I have heard some people say that the PPP was traumatised by attempts to rig the March 2020 election and the party is still angry with individuals and organisations that did not condemn the unbelievable depravity or remained silent on the horrendous degeneracy.

The question is whether that feeling is a valid one to understand. My answer is yes because I still carry a mentally despondent note on my shirt sleeve. To understand that psychological setback one has to comprehend past mental traumas about rigged elections (1968, 1973, 1978 referendum, 1980, and 1985).

But you also have to understand the people around you that shared those traumas who have since defected from the struggle to empower people with the right to have them vote for the leaders they want to administer their country.

I will admit to anyone who speaks to me in public or private that I am still to recover from a blow to my psychology on what I heard Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine told his interviewer, Neil Marks, in June 2020. He called for a declaration of the results even though he said that there were thousands of irregularities.

The March 2020 election was a personal tragedy in the life of every individual who from the seventies and eighties up to 1992 marched with the PPP, WPA, Guyana Human Rights Association, Guyana Bar Association, Democratic Labour Movement, Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Liberator Party, Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement, UG Workers’ Union, Clerical and Commercial Workers Union, GAWU, FITUG, GUARD for free and fair election in this country.

The list here is just a short one. It was an era of unmitigated energy to extirpate the culture of rigged elections that Prime Minister Forbes Burnham ushered in with the first fraudulent poll in 1968. The violence and degeneracy in each election got worse.

The 1973 poll saw soldiers killing two PPP supporters who tried to prevent the forceful removal of the ballot boxes in Berbice. The 1978 referendum to change the constitution was marked by even greater lengths of fraud. The 1980 was perhaps the worst that one could have imagined.

But when you thought it couldn’t get worse, there came the 1985 poll. The difference with the pre 1985 elections and the 1985 poll was the absence of Burnham’s wicked ingenuity. He had died in August of 1985. The 1985 poll was incredible and unimaginable for those who witnessed the first rigged job in 1968.

You have to put yourself in the mind of someone who lived through all those elections only to see the evil return in 2020. No one that belonged to the fantastic epoch of the great struggle for free and fair election could have believed it was happening again. It was for that reason, I couldn’t come to grips with what I heard Roopnaraine uttered. This man was one of the heroes of that great epoch I mentioned above.

Minister Priya Manickchand expressed her feeling last Monday to me and Leonard Gildarie about what her mind was tortured with by those who either supported the March 2020 rigging or those that remained silent. It was a fine articulation of someone expressing the piercing of the heart, soul and mind by human failings.

She named four individuals – David Hinds, Khemraj Ramjattan, Nigel Hughes and Karen DeSouza. She spoke of how she once admired Hinds and thought he had a value to contribute to Guyana and the world.

She described the lofty ideals she learnt from working as a new, young lawyer with Messrs. Hughes and Ramjattan. She declared it was painful to experience the disappointment with people she once admired for their human rights advocacy. This was good stuff that young Guyanese interested in the politics of freedom, empowerment and liberation should look at.

She enunciated a theory that was making the rounds since 2015 when the AFC began to drift in the direction of “dead meat alley.” She argues that what the failure of the AFC has done is to dent the success of other parties that want to fill the third party vacancy.

It is a theory strongly embraced by many political analysts and political observers. The 2020 showing of the smaller parties were not only uninspiring but displayed an ominous sign for the future.

Between 7 of them they pulled a total of 8872 votes even though the leaders of many of them were huge names in Guyana. None of them on their own secured, even 3000 votes. These results could be directly attributed to the pessimism in voters that the AFC became dead meat from 2015. Not only did the AFC become dead meat. It turned other third parties into dead meat too.

(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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