Latest update April 17th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 01, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
A columnist on this day does one of three things – reflect on the year just gone or offer your views on what you see unfolding in the coming year or publish your wish-list. Today has to be an exception because this is the day the PPP was born.
It would be foolish to deny that the PPP (even more than the PNC) has shaped this country into what it is today. When one refers to the PPP, one is essentially looking at the PPP of the Jagans from 1955. We can dispense with the PPP under Burnham and Jagan that lasted for five years.
Shortly after the 1955 split between Jagan and Burnham, the PPP beat the PNC in a general election. We can therefore divide the PPP into three stages – from premiership to loss of power in 1964; the wilderness years, ‘64-’92; and the modern return to power, ’92 to the present.
It is impossible to compress 53 years (from the election victory in ‘57 to the present) into one column, and I don’t feel inclined to make this assessment into a series. What follows then is a broad, analytical sweep with some judgmental values rather than a critical evaluation of each segment of the PPP’s evolution.
Like or dislike the PPP, it has done to the psychology of its adherents what few other political organizations have achieved throughout the history of the modern world. If Guyana was a popular actor in international politics like the big, powerful states in the Third World, there would have been tons of published books on the peculiar, esoteric and illogical yet enduring relation this organization has with its supporters.
Throughout its history, the Jaganite PPP has manifested so many destructive, immoral, politically unpalatable and shockingly unbelievable traits from 1955 to this moment in time that its survival among its supporters is tantamount to a miracle.
Why the East Indians remain loyal to the PPP is a strange occurrence in the history of politics. There is more logic in the relation between the PNC and African-Guyanese than the PPP and the Guyanese Indians. One doesn’t know where to start in this long period of 1957 to 2009.
Take communism. Forget about the embrace of communism; all Third World radicals in the fifties were Marxist. But Jagan’s situation was intriguing. Here was a man that was a devout and inflexible communist, yet one can classify his constituencies as a 100 percent religious people and a thousand percent capitalist in orientation.
While Jagan extolled the virtues of the USSR, his people from the fifties onwards showed no interest in communism or Cuba or the USSR and migrated in large numbers to three of the world’s top capitalist nations – UK, Canada, USA.
Today there are large schools of East Indians around the world that include people with excellent degrees from excellent universities that would say they admire Cheddi Jagan and they support the PPP. Yet they cannot explain and don’t want to explain the terrible mistakes of this man, his party’s co-founder, Mrs. Jagan and other PPP stalwarts.
In 1964, after leaving it up to the British Government to decide what electoral system British Guiana should have, this man used the sugar workers to create violence that would stop the elections. The result was a horrible level of racial mayhem. After making his mistake, by trusting the British, instead of apologizing, he manipulated his followers.
In 1977, this man and his party called a tempestuous strike in the sugar zones to protest the imposition of the Sugar Levy on the sugar industry. When he got into power, he refused to abolish a policy that he deemed was evil when it came into being in 1977. After putting his people through horrible periods of brutalization, this man and his party signed a pact in 1985 with an organization he told his people was evil, the PNC.
In 1985, Jagan committed the PPP to a joint slate with Mr. Burnham and the PNC for the 1985 general election in which Burnham would be the President and he, Jagan would be the Prime Minister. In 1985 when Burnham died, instead of seeking a local accommodation with other parties and a dialogue with the West, he announced to the world that the PPP had transformed itself from a loose, mass-based party to a tight communist organization.
After promising the Americans he had abandoned communism for the ‘92 elections, in 1993, he proclaimed at the PPP congress in Port Mourant that he was still Marxist-Leninist. In 1992 when he won the elections, he turned his back on the people who helped him the most in times of need – the WPA. Shall we go on?
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