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Dec 19, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
These are the words of the brilliant Irish academic, Cormac Ó Gráda. This has been the social obligation of all persons the past five thousands years in ancient African, Indian and Chinese civilizations.
In Western thought, it is said to begin with Socrates and Plato. It was Plato, more than two thousand years ago, who broke with tradition and wrote the unthinkable. In his fantastic work, THE REPUBLC, Plato argued that women have a vital role to play in society and due recognition must be given to the importance of women.
If knowledge is going to be placed in the hands of humans so they can achieve more for civilization, then educated people, researchers and teachers have to investigate myths and explode them. If we don’t, we pass off falsities and fictions and they will eventually guide civilization into its own demise.
There is a debate going on in the two independent dailies about the role of Cheddi Jagan and his treatment of the Working People’s Alliance after 1992. Those who admire and love Jagan inevitably embrace the tendency to see him in angelic terms. It is sad that prior to the early nineties, our historiography was presented to us as Jagan the good guy versus Burnham the bad one. Guyana’s contemporary history is far more complicated than that.
Very few of us, East Indians, escaped this good guy versus bad guy myth that was fed to us by our elders in the East Indian community. Speaking for myself, I only freed myself from it when I became a young political activist who then went into university. I saw Cheddi Jagan, up close and personal and what I looked at was certainly not the great man my parents and other Indians thought he was.
Just a diversion to make my point. There was a Hindu pandit who was quite revered in the Hindu community. It would shock the world if his skeletons were to be made public. This was no nice man but a person who led a young girl to commit suicide. This diversion is simply to make the point that historians that know the myths have a sacred duty to history and society to dissolve them.
Cheddi Jagan was no bad, authoritarian leader; far from it. But Cheddi Jagan was certainly not the nice, broad-minded, nationalist leader that his admirers continue to paint him as including the recent debate about his attitude to the WPA after he became President in 1992.
The treatment of the WPA after 1992 was one of the great acts of betrayal in all 20th century history anywhere in the world. One of the myths that must be shattered is the fiction that the PPP carried the fight to the Burnham Government after Jagan lost power in 1964. The historical record does not support this polemic.
From 1964 to 1968, Burnham Government was not autocratic but a democratically elected administration. Things began to fall apart after 1968. By 1970, other opposition groups had come up to fight Burnham along with the PPP and this happened from 1970 to 1992. The WPA was the main rampart against Burnham’s excesses.
In fact, from 1970 onwards, Jagan refused to cooperate with several anti-government groups assigning various condescending labels to them. Here is Jagan in his own words; “New opposition groupings have developed and are becoming more vocal – the Ratoon, Movement Against Oppression, Guyana anti-Discrimination Movement, the Patriots. Broadly, these groups fall within two categories –petty bourgeois revolutionism and petty bourgeois nationalism. As such they represent deviationist and opportunistic trends.” (source: Cheddi Jagan, “Guyana: A New Stage,” in Thunder, July-December, 1971, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp 9-19)
These were Dr. Jagan’s own words. This was the way he felt about opposition groups who took on the Burnham Government. Jagan was never happy with them because they had the potential to eclipsing the PPP and that is what the WPA did first in the form of the Movement Against Oppression, then Ratoon and eventually becoming the Working People’s Alliance.
It is heresy to say that from 1970 when these groups emerged (and after 1970, others came upon the scene like the Guyana Human Rights Association) until 1992 when Jagan won the elections, the PPP was the main vehicle of activism against the Burnham Government. By the middle of the seventies until his death, it was Walter Rodney that weakened the power base of the then PNC Government and the WPA was far more creative and confrontationist than the PPP.
After 1992, Jagan did what he always had done – hog power. We are now paying for Jagan’s inherent flaws.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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