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May 08, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
In a desperate attempt to find safer ground, King Richard exclaimed, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! He didn’t get a horse. Instead he got a sword in his body. For many Guyanese, it is not a bad idea to exchange their kingdom for an American visa, particularly the constituencies that have supported the PPP since the 1950s.
Among the thousands that left their kingdom in Guyana and took a flying horse to North America, some ended up like King Richard one of whom I knew very well. It was tragic how many of them met their deaths in places like the USA. But you certainly couldn’t blame Cheddi Jagan’s supporters for wanting to migrate after the PPP lost power in 1964. They didn’t trust the new PNC Government and felt they would have been discriminated against.
The second greatest irony of Guyanese life is that for twenty two years now, Papa Cheddi’s party has totally dominated every aspect of life in Guyana but the King Richard cry goes on among PPP constituents. East Indians are migrating like mad from this country.
US Embassy statistics put it as 14 citizens a day and that excludes illegal migration to the US and legal and illegal migration to Canada, Trinidad and Suriname. Imagine the unbelievable fact that the US Embassy no longer wants to see accompanying documents in the application for a visitor’s visa. The mountains of bogus documents have overwhelmed the Embassy that they couldn’t endure the daily irritation.
Of those numbers the greater percentage are East Indians. It would shock the people of this country to know the large numbers of close relatives of the senior governors in the PPP and the government that have left Guyana since the PPP came to power and the substantial amount that migrated the past ten years.
The horrible fact staring this nation is that in twenty years’ time, the Indian percentage of Guyana will be close to marginal. Just look at the lines last week that stretched endlessly when the US Embassy held an outreach to educate people on how to apply for all types of visas. Thousands of King Richards braved the sun just to hear how to apply.
If the exodus of Indians from Guyana since the 1990s is the second greatest irony, what is the first? The greatest irony in the world since Alexander the Great united the Greek city states right up to the present time, was the embrace Indians gave to Cheddi Jagan who was one of the world’s fanatical preachers of communism while they were fanatical admirers of capitalism and capitalist countries.
It remains a mystery to the world as to what went through the mind of Jagan when he toured North America and saw his people in the thousands living in Canada and the US. Cheddi’s heart must have sunk when he returned to Guyana and during his stop over in Havana saw no Indian Guyanese migrant working in Cuba.
Why Indians are leaving in mass exodus is not an analysis that can be explained in a newspaper column but its continuation has certainly reshaped the sociology of Guyana, chief of which is the electoral landscape. Dr. Roger Luncheon told the press that Guyana’s latest census cannot be made public because that is a decision of the Caricom Secretariat. Luncheon stated that the census was a CARICOM project.
The barefaced things the PPP leaders tell this hapless and helpless nation. I phoned a close contact of the CARICOM Secretariat and he told me that Caricom will not prevent any member-state from releasing the census.
Why make the census public when it will reveal the diminishing presence of the East Indian population. That would certainly encourage the Opposition to work harder.
A poignant academic question was once put to me by a student at UG. He asked if Jagan was alive in the age of Rihanna and Justin Timberlake would he still have proclaimed his belief in communism. I told him I doubt it. Young Indians have gone through a virtual cultural evolution since social networking took over the world. This is another electoral headache for the PPP hegemonic billionaires. Could they rely on young Indians the way Papa Cheddi did in 1992?
It makes you wonder how Indians would react when the Indian Arrival Committee or the Dharmic Sabha holds their annual Indian mela in Berbice (as they did last week for Arrival Day) and in the midst of those large crowds, a helicopter comes down sharing out American visas. People will get trampled. Is it possible Arrival Day will be replaced by Departure Day?
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