Ramharack and his comrades in New York on campaign to besmirch image, belittle the struggles of the Jagans

Oct 01, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor,

In its September 22, 2024 edition S/N published a letter written by Baytoram Ramharack; ‘Janet Jagan showed little interest in Indian history and culture.’

Whatever his motive, Ramharack and his comrades in New York seem bent on waging a letter-writing campaign to besmirch the image and belittle the struggles of the Jagans of this country.

This is not the first time such letters were published. Based on what he wrote from time to time, it is clear that Ramharak and Co’s obsession is to denigrate the Jagan legacy, shape it in an anti-Indian framework and replace it with le’ grande epiphany of a deceased, non-resident Indo-Guyanese critic of Cheddi Jagan.

This time, Ramharack chose to pick a bone with Janet Jagan, a founder member of the PPP and former President of Guyana. But hard as he tries, life itself has proven his campaign unattractive, nor is it gaining traction within the wider Guyanese society.

Observers are keen to know what exactly was Ramharack referring to with his reference to ‘Indian culture;’ Is it the Hindutva-type Indian culture or is he referring to what we know as Guyanese multi-culturalism? Was he thinking of today’s new writing, thinking, music and art? Did he have in mind contemporary culture; a thriving and innovative Guyanese/Caribbean scene, replete with original forms and vibrant content? Or did he envisage something simple and copy-cat-like, replete with patterns of the past? These are serious questions any pretentious academic needs to answer.

Further, it seems to me that Ramharack’s reference to ‘Indian history’ should be viewed in a Guyanese context and should mean Indo-Guyanese/Caribbean history.

Worse yet, any attempt by his comrade at home to show that Indo-Guyanese owe a debt of gratitude to Afro-Guyanese historically and contemporarily contradicts President Ali’s modernistic pursuit of ‘One Guyana’ as well as his commitment to the ‘Pact for the Future’ principle and goal of ‘Leaving No One Behind.’

Long before Ramharack opened his eyes in his infancy, many others who opposed Cheddi and Janet Jagan tried to bring them down on ideological and political grounds however, those efforts fell flat on their faces. Up to today, long after the Jagans shut their eyes and were cremated, the revisionists of Janet Jagan’s role in the making of Guyana’s contemporary history, went to work from a Hindu supremacist perspective to chip away at her legacy.

Ramharack used the recently published book; ‘Janet Jagan Freedom Fighter For Guyana’ by Patricia Mohammed, as the occasion to write disparagingly about one of the founders of the PPP and the first woman President of Guyana. But his bellyaching notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that her legacy is enduring knowing that the PPP she left behind continues to enjoy the support of the Guyanese electorate who have not lost faith in the PPP and continue to elect the party to office time and again.

Come October 5th, the 37th anniversary of what was celebrated then as ‘The Dawn of a New Era’ will be observed. Janet Jagan was the first representative of the PPP on the Elections Commission chaired at that time by Sir Donald Jackson. During the period she served on the commission from 1964 to 1967, she was the first to expose the internal machinations of the PNC controlled commission to rig the 1968 election using fraudulent voter registration cards; abuse proxy and postal voting and to pad the overseas voters’ list with phantom voters in the UK, America and the Caribbean. It was her expose’ that led the then UK based Granada Television to produce a programme exposing the 1964 election rigging.

Four years later, following the 1968 election Granada TV produced ‘The Trail of the Vanishing Voter’ and ‘The Making of a Prime Minister.’ (See S/N October 22,2009 edition; ‘The 1968 General Elections and the 1969 National Assembly of the Second Parliament of Guyana.’) And following the seizure of the ballot boxes by the GDF at 1973 election Granda TV produced the documentary, ‘Mr. Burnham Does It Again’.

Mrs. Jagan documented the army intervention in the 1973 election in her booklet ‘Army Intervention In The 1973 Elections in Guyana,’ showing how, as a result of electoral rigging, the PNC increased its vote from 40 per cent (1964) per cent to 71 per cent (1973).

Ramharack chose to ignore these significant contributions by Janet Jagan in the fight against the Burnham dictatorship and helped energize the struggle for free and fair elections and the restoration of democracy in Guyana. That struggle resulted eventually in the elections victory by the PPP/C on October 5th, 1992.

Instead of situating Janet Jagan at the center of the Guyanese people’s struggle for free and fair elections and the restoration of democracy in which Indo-Guyanese led by the PPP played the leading role, Ramharack chose, for the sake of his narrow-minded and clannish academic pursuits to jump on incendiary ethnically-laced rhetoric and esoteric issues camouflaged as legitimate historical and cultural phenomena.

Graduates like Ramharack who claims to have studied at an American college are prone to accept Western ideologues’ interpretations and narratives about ideological, social and political developments in countries of the Global South. As a consequence, because of their disdain for the ideology and politics of the Jagan’s what they set out to accomplish is to influence the Indo-Guyanese populace ideologically into accepting a Hindu supremacist ideology and anti-Jagan narrative.

Such writings and pronouncements must be exposed as unhelpful and mischievous, they do not contribute to the unity and cohesion of the nation as a whole.

Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee

• Cheddi Jagan, Freedom Fighter, grande, Jagan legacy, Ramharack