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By Pandita Indrani |
April, 2002: Post-modern politics is calling for a paradigm shift in thinking, Ravi Dev affirmed. "Our societies are in the old mode of using authoritarian structures to bludgeon the population into accepting the status quo even when they are excluded from decision-making. We are calling for a paradigm shift in social relations as to how we should organize society. All structures should encourage consensus rather than conflict, linkages rather than cleavages which is what the Westminster systems do! They encourage conflict."
Ravi Dev, Member of Parliament of Guyana and leader of ROAR, the Caribbean's first Indian Party, visited Trinidad in March to deliver a series of lectures on the topic.
Conflict may be reduced in plural societies, like Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, through the principle of power sharing in politics, said Ravi Dev, explaining that the Westminster political system is more applicable to homogenous societies. The Westminister system, he said, excludes large blocs of people where ethnic voting takes place, alienating them from the democratic process.
"It thus means then that when one party is elected to power it is seen as one race or ethnic group elected to power, and the rest of the population do not see it as their government. Secondly, and more insidiously, if the group that loses the elections, considers itself a minority without any other bases of power, then it concludes that, under the democratic system as practiced, it would be excluded from power indefinitely."
Ravi Dev highlighted the fact that Caribbean politicians (Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana) disregard the ethnic bases of politics, and, ironically, are compelled to pretend that have a multiethnic party. "But the voting for the last 40 years have shown that voting is always along ethnic lines. Therefore, the premises of the Westminster model where people in a homogeneous society vote on issues and not on race - are not applicable to us," he insisted.
By describing their parties as mulit-ethnic, politicians are confirming that they will have the legitimacy to govern if they had the support of all sections of the population. However, everyone knows that because of the ethnic voting the multiracial support is not real, and is seen only as token, in reference to the outside group, when a few of their members are brought into the government."
Affirming that ethnically polarized parties do not have the legitimacy to rule in plural societies, Ravi Dev stressed that in a post modern world ethnicity is a valid mode of expressing identity. "Ethnicity is a phenomenon that will grow rather than decrease. And those who saw it as backward in the 19th century will now find that values such as self-determination of peoples and equality are universal norms. Groups, nowadays, are unwilling to go the assimilation route and disappear. So it comes back to modifying the structure of government in order to deal with this reality.
"When we were founded as colonies, Britain was promulgating a notion that once you were governed in a particular territory that all had to see themselves as one people. But history has shown that Britain itself has had to abandon this notion and is now giving autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. "
The actual structure for power sharing will vary to suit the realities of a society, explained Ravi Dev. For instance, if, as in Guyana, the ethnic groups were concentrated in different geographical areas of the country, then a federal structure would ensure that each group has some measure of power because in each state a particular group would have governance.
He talked on the power sharing approach of "consociationalism," where ministries are shared between different parties representing the different groups. This occurs in Malaysia where Chinese, Malays and Indians are the major ethnic groups. In this form of government the parties have to explicitly accept their ethnic bases and the elites are then seen to be bargaining for their ethnic blocs.
Referring to the present political impasse in Trinidad and Tobago, Ravi Dev says that "an interesting model was offered by Mr. Panday which is that the party that wins the largest number of votes (proportional representation) should name the president of the country and the presidency should be an executive one (having substantive powers) where the president selects his cabinet, not from members of parliament; it could be from members of both parties or society at large. In essence, it is a technocratic cabinet as in America. The party with the second largest number of votes names the prime minister, who sits in parliament. This is, therefore, a counterweight to the executive branch. In such an arrangement the select committees of parliament can be structured so as to give the Opposition parity, or a substantial voice in the scrutiny of legislation. This latter innovation was introduced in Guyana as a power sharing mechanism after the 1998 violence against Indians by the PNC, leading to the Herdmanston Accord and constitutional change."
"The two parties will have to agree to some type of power sharing because of the impasse," explained Ravi Dev. "If there are elections by the end of the year it is certain that the differential in votes will, at the most, result in a 19-17 split and a government formed from the "19" will not be seen as representative now that Mr. Panday has put power sharing on the agenda. In so doing, Mr. Panday has now shown or accepted that his party has an ethnic base and this will not change substantially. Therefore, the other groups will not see his government as legitimate. The PPP in Guyana had said, before 1992, that they were committed to power sharing and came up with an appendage called "civic" which, they claimed, involved elements from all sections of the society. So it is interesting to see what devices Mr. Panday would come up with to address power sharing amongst the various ethnic groups."
Dev also analysed how minorities in Guyana and Trinidad responded to their exclusion from political power. In Guyana, he said, the Africans had "nurtured a tradition of violent resistance and saw their "kith and kin" as controlling the institutions which could impose sanctions on protest action. While, in Trinidad and Tobago, after the passage of Bhadase Sagan Maraj, the Indians did not have a similar philosophy of protest orientation and were not in control of the state coercive apparatus and accepted their exclusion without protest. So leadership strategy is crucial in these situations. We are now left to see that if the PNM were to entrench themselves in office, whether the Indians of Trinidad and Tobago, in their evaluation of the situation, would once again sink into resignation to the status quo, or will take other action to ensure that they are not excluded, in perpetuity, from the power relations of their society."