Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 04, 2012 Letters
Dear Editor,
I have always held Ralph Ramkarran as personally decent but politically incorrigible and expedient, which casts serious doubt over the entirety of his integrity. So, when Ralph Ramkarran wrote in the Weekend Mirror (‘Flexing Majoritian Muscle’, February 24, 2012) and then again in the Kaieteur News (‘Chris Ram’s views were blinkered’, March 1, 2012), Mr. Ramkarran was enabling us a chilling introspective into the stark difference between personal dignity and political indecency.
Ralph Ramkarran wondered aloud in the Mirror whether the “real reason” for the Opposition refusing to approve the PPP’s land preparation expenditure for the construction of the specialist hospital by the Indian government “is that the Opposition in fact had some sympathy with PNC executive member Hamilton Green who had suggested in a letter to the press that the hospital might be a vehicle by India to colonise Guyana.” Ramkarran went on to call Green’s statement “racist bilge” in his KN letter.
Let us examine what Green said in his letter titled “Questions abound about this specialist hospital” (Stabroek News, December 29, 2011). Green said “….are we to understand according to Dr. Luncheon that there is no training component, and therefore is this facility being set up to move monies generated here, and elsewhere out of Guyana?
We obtained independence in 1966. Is this a move for some sort of recolonisation? Those of us old enough will remember the effort by the PPP in the early 1960’s to bring in a large number of persons from the Communist State of Kerala in India. Is this a retooling of that plan?”
There is absolutely nothing wrong in the first three lines if Green did not pen the last two lines. The reference to colonization would be logical since Green believed there would be no locals trained and the wealth would be shipped abroad. Even Cheddi Jagan would have opposed such a hospital built by Indians under the PNC on those terms.
The last two lines expose Green’s senility of intellect and illogicality, inappropriateness, irresponsibility, foolishness, race-baiting and race pandering. There is no logical validity to Green’s quantum leap from the first three lines to the last two lines. Because of that troubling lack of rationalisation, one can only surmise that Green was letting that age-old raging race infection to corrupt his reasoning. Its very lack of logical dignity makes it believable that it was placed there to appeal to race.
While Green’s statements rattle the race cage, I do not find Ramkarran’s any better. Ramkarran selectively dismisses as a “flimsy excuse” the Opposition’s tendered reason for rejecting the PPP’s spending on the ground that the Minister should have foreseen the expenditure. That is a completely reasonable reason!!
After stating the Opposition had no proper excuse, Ramkarran dropped the hand grenade of race into the fire when he stated “This leaves one to wonder whether the real reason is that the Opposition in fact had some sympathy with PNC executive member Hamilton Green who had suggested in a letter to the press that the hospital might be a vehicle by India to colonize Guyana.”
Ramkarran confides in the public that Green’s words amounted to an “….. implied assertion that the PPP is colluding with India to colonise Guyana because India is assisting Guyana to build a hospital.” Ramkarran calls Green’s contention ‘racist bilge” and rightly so.
However, how different is Green’s irresponsibility and race-mongering from Ramkarran’s outlandish political smuttiness and intellectual chicanery in impliedly asserting that the entire Opposition was racist like Green since the “real reason” for their voting down the PPP on the Indian hospital spending was because they sympathised with Green’s “racist bilge”?
Can we really give Ramkarran a pass while assailing Green when Ramkarran dismissed the Opposition’s reason as “flimsy”, refused to address other valid reasons including some produced by Green in that infamous letter and then focuses the entire enquiry on asking whether the “real reason” for the Opposition acting in the manner it did was dictated and motivated by race?
Ramkarran somehow failed to wonder whether the Opposition did not like the fact that the PPP came to the Parliament seeking approval for a shocking $97 million (US $485,000) spent on land preparation. He failed to wonder whether the Opposition wanted to know why the US $18 million line of credit obtained by the PPP government could not be applied to land preparation as opposed to withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund. Or how about the fact that the Minister of Finance should have known about this negotiation, whether typical secret PPP deal or not, and that such negotiation did not just commence in 2011 but in 2010.
The government budgeted $150 million for preparatory work and yet wanted $97 million more approved without a single block being laid on the building itself. $247 million without an actual building started and Ramkarran could not discuss these reasons. He ignored them and went straight to the suggestion of a race issue.
To hint that an entire Opposition of a country including a multiracial party with Indians voted on race against Indians when staggering questions of financial tragedy accompanied this spending is to beat the drum of race just as loudly as the other guy who made the insane suggestion that ethnic re-colonization would occur with the building of a hospital.
This is the same Opposition which the same Ramkarran confirmed “supported the first Paper, except two items, and merely caused the deferment of the second,” clearly not an act of a deranged outfit hell-bent on revenge.
Ralph Ramkarran has not only lost his moral marbles, he has confirmed my theory that there is a difference between personal decency and political heinousness. The question is, should we really continue to separate the two when it is the same sordid soul involved?
If Ramkarran thinks that this kind of writing to a largely Indian audience in a PPP propaganda newspaper does not raise the readership’s contemplation of the Opposition as one unified body of racists, he is deluding himself. I cannot say I expect better from Ramkarran. He has long chained himself to political depravity under the shady caricature of the PPP since Cheddi Jagan.
This is who he is, someone willing to subjugate his morality and oppress his integrity for the party that mockingly rejected his call for democracy by voting by Stalinist show of hands. Maybe this is why they will never give him his due for they know he is always a willing lackey to party policy.
Ramkarran’s open wonderings may be delivering the picture the PPP wants for a new election in this broken and destitute country; an Opposition voting down the PPP’s spending on an Indian hospital on the basis of race.
Some will scream this is an assault on Indians, the Opposition and Parliament are bad for Indians and they detest anything Indian. Have we not seen this trailer leading up to November 28, 2011 and the rocky horror picture show it delivered?
M. Maxwell
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