Latest update April 17th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 07, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I find it perplexingly worrying that Clive Thomas has not as yet taken on Ravi Dev in the latter’s attempt to pass on propaganda and call it political theorising. Dev has been getting away with this for years now. About two to three years ago, I had a running battle with him over the same accusation.
Since the advent of the election season, Dev has resuscitated his stratagem. He found an opportunity when it was claimed that Tacuma Ogunseye urged that African Guyanese take to the streets to demand power-sharing after the election.
In his latest piece his trademark is graphically emblazoned on his thinking. In his last Sunday KN column, we have quotes after quotes from different philosophers but one fails to see their relevance to the perennial argument that we have an ethnically dominated government whose policies can endanger the existence of the society therefore there has to be the formations of new institutions to prevent that fate.
Titled, “The legitimate state,” Dev goes around in circles and arrives at where he has always been – the fulcrum on which a legitimate state rests is the security apparatus. This is misleading and can be labeled theoretical distortion.
Dev’s essay is a particularly egregious piece because of its intellectual dishonesty. I will quote two manifestations of the political nastiness in the article and juxtapose them so readers can clearly see the long-standing intent of Dev.
Here we go; “The domination of the key state institutions by one ethnic group had delegitimised our state before and after Independence, the PNC focused on consolidating the state in the image of its constituency.”
What Dev is saying that when the PNC was in power, the state could not have been legitimate because it was a manipulative tool in the hands of the government to serve the ethnic base of the PNC. That, of course, means African Guyanese. Here now is the other statement where political theory becomes a propaganda tool in the hands of Dev; “The PPP faltered in reforming the state’s legitimacy and today we are all wringing our hands that nothing works…Guyana and none of its groups will ever progress if the state remains manned by kith and kin.” Let’s explain this, then, expose the dangerous content of Dev’s arguments.
First, he is shamelessly saying that the PNC’s rule was shaped to serve racial interests but the PPP has not done that. On the contrary, the PPP is hovering around a self-destructive corner in that it has not legitimised the state because the state is still controlled by kith and kin, meaning African Guyanese.
Dev’s deviousness is that he takes political theory suited for industrial society and applies it to peculiar Third World polities like Guyana. For example, he separates state and government. The state is the fulcrum on which rests the existence of the polity. But in small, personalised societies like Guyana, the government assumes proportions that are equal to the state.
If the country will go nowhere because the state is ethnically driven why can’t you say the same for the government? In Guyana, it is both intellectual and political dishonesty bordering on morbid thinking not to see that the government has been re-shaping the state since Cheddi Jagan came to power in 1992.
The first attempt was the restructuring of Customs and Excise. That strategy has been more successful at Guysuco. When the PPP came to power in 1992, Guysuco’s management was eighty percent African. Nineteen years after the PPP’s hegemony, it is ninety percent East Indian. What Dev is doing is dissecting the importance of the state and resting its importance solely in the security forces.
When Dev wrote last Sunday that the PPP faltered in reforming the legitimacy of the state he was talking about the security forces. He means that the PPP still has to live with a security apparatus that is named by “PNC’s constituencies.”
That, of course, means African Guyanese. But what about the government? What authority does it have? It has enormous power.
Dev would reject this and for very insidious, invidious reasons would tell readers that the economy is not epiphenomenal with the state but separate from it. This is political theory that is not only inappropriate to small, Third World states like Guyana but is also propagandistic. It is time we relentlessly pursue Dev’s fallacious paradigms and destroy them.
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