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June 6, 2002: How the PPP and PNC will fare in the next poll due in four year's time is anyone's guess. After nine years in power, the historical aura and political halo of the PPP are waning and waning fast. What seems likely is that the PPP is poised to poll more votes than the PNC because of racially based voting patterns. But this may not be sufficient to propel the PPP to victory. Or could it? To understand the prospects of a PPP victory in 2006, one must comprehend the complete alienation of Guyanese Indians from the PNC at the moment, a trend which the PNC seems helpless to reverse
If there is going to be a minority government in 2006 in which the PPP wins the presidency but loses out on a parliamentary majority then the causal factors will be an increase in Indian votes for Ravi Dev and ROAR, C.N. Sharma and his Justice For All Party or another Indian rights party, coupled with large scale defections of Amerindian voters from the PPP to WPA/GAP. But one scenario that seems not only unlikely but virtually impossible, is a meaningful transfer of Indian votes from the PPP and other Indian based parties to the PNC come the year 2006. To understand this, one simply has to reflect on the nature of the post-election crises in 1997 and 2001. But a more complete comprehension of this phenomenon lies in the distant past.
After the split between Jagan and Burnham, an interesting, and fascinating situation emerged. Indians of national standing chose the Burnhamite faction. One explanation for this was that these people were unhappy with Jagan's radical brand of socialism which had dimensions of communism, while Burnham appeared to be more social democratic than communistic in his ideological pronouncements. The rest is now history. Jagan indeed became communist, and this engendered a western conspiracy against him that led to a violent destabilisation campaign and eventual removal of his government in the first half of the sixties. One tragic feature of those brutal years was the number of Indian deaths and Indian displacement from Linden. Despite these horrendous sufferings, Indians kept the faith with Jagan and his PPP. But was it really a question of keeping the faith or simply a case of not having a choice? When the United Force of Portuguese businessman, Peter D'Aguiar went into the election of 1964, its constituencies consisted not only of interior Amerindians and the mercantilist Portuguese middle class but a sizeable group of Indian business people and urban working class Indians. This was a lesson that the PNC leadership failed to learn. Because of the savagery that visited the Indian people in the riots of the sixties, the process of Indian alienation from the PNC began and is now complete. We will return to this theme below.
From 1964, until the mid nineties, Indian people gave their political (as distinct from electoral) support to Dr. Jagan and the PPP. This consistency was broken during the second half of the seventies when the charisma of Walter Rodney, and the political bravery of the Working People's Alliance eclipsed the historical endurance of the PPP. After Rodney's assassination, the WPA's essential pillars gradually weakened and at the turn of the eighties, Indian support had returned to the PPP.
It is important to assess the nature of this support. The Indian political embrace for the PPP has never been and at the moment is not based on ideological affinity. Indian people have not been and are not social democratic in outlook, liberal in their world conceptualisations, left-wing in their political judgements, and radical in ideological make-up. One can hardly refer to Indian struggle on the sugar estates as more radical than other struggles elsewhere in the Caribbean and the third world. They are people more inclined to capitalist conservatism than socialist statism. The Indians in Guyana have never demonstrated any emotional or intellectual admiration for Marxian economics or communist politics. They are commonly referred to in the English-speaking Caribbean as the Jews of the Caribbean. It is not necessary to do a survey to see this phenomenom. From the estate worker, to the carpenter, to the baby-sitter, to the high school dreamer, to the small businessmen, they all want to start a business or migrate to capitalist economies in order to make money. The Indian community's relation with the PPP has never been intellectual and ideological. It has been and is at the moment a marriage based on the politics of race and insecurity.
Indian people as stated very early in this paper equate political violence with the PNC. For them, the PNC's intention is to forever confront them as to undermine their social status in Guyana. From 1964 to 1989 whether rightly or wrongly, this is how they feel, and the research bears this out. The overnight success of Ravi Dev and Roar testifies to this. From the sixties onwards, Indian people look to the PPP for their self-preservation. It was like a father and son relation. The son tolerates the father's drunken behaviour because he is the breadwinner of the family. The Indians from the sixties onwards couldn't have cared less about Jagan and his frenetic obsession with the success of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR in world politics and the eventual victory of communism. These ideological accoutrements of their leader and his party had to be tolerated because the PPP was the only guarantee of the Indian presence in Guyana. Then the Indian people saw an opportunity to transfer their support to a party that guaranteed a safer avenue for their freedoms, and that was Walter Rodney and his Working People's Alliance.
It was not just the charisma and valour of Rodney that attracted Indians to him, the entire WPA leadership appeared in the eyes of Indian people as the party more likely to remove the Burnham regime. The WPA had an additional factor going for it; within its ranks it had cadres who were Indians and more dynamic than the Freedom House protégés. As to be expected with this kind of development, a silent spilt emerged in the anti-dictatorship solidarity that for most of the time was submerged through the maturity of both Rodney and Jagan but there were episodic nastiness among the leadership of both parties that sometimes spilled over to the public domain. The WPA leadership claimed throughout the seventies and eighties, (a belief they still cling to) that the PPP felt insecure with the presence of WPA personnel in Indian villages and would resort to unfriendly methods to undermine WPA's effectiveness in fighting the Burnham regime.
The Indian belief that the PNC is a racist outfit is nurtured by the political activism of Ravi Dev and his ROAR organisation. Unlike the ruling party, which for the sake of protocol and social stability cannot make an outright statement that the PNC is anti-Indian, Dev and ROAR are not restrained by these diplomatic and ideological factors. This type of Indian activism is a cause of concern to the PPP which has already conceded a parliamentary seat to Dev, and may bring about a re-thinking of the government's relation with the PNC. Two recent developments indicate this. It has been reported in the state-owned Chronicle of May 23, 02 that the president told a gathering on the West Coast that PNC elements are associated with the five escapees. Secondly, in the same issue of the papers, Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Luncheon is quoted as saying that the government will be using its majority to bring into existence the service commissions without having to wait indefinitely for PNC participation in the consultation process.
The forecast for 2002 is that economic growth will be minimal, if any growth at all. The PPP doesn't seem to have the intellectual resources to transform Guyana into a viable political economy, and a menu of daily mistake is visible. If the status quo continues up to 2006 when the next poll is due, the result will become a great guessing game. One prediction that seems fair set to be true is the complete separation of Indian voters from the PNC. The PNC may even find it hard to field Indian candidates and to secure donations from their traditional Indian business friends. The belief that the PNC is supportive of criminals who attack Indian entrepreneurs may have permanently damaged the PNC in the eyes of the Indian half of the country's population. There can be no more appropriate word but macabre to describe the methodology the PNC uses in its role of opposition party. Here is a country with a ruling party that is saddled with declining support, a stagnant economy but most of all here is a country whose population lives in fear of gangs of criminals engaged in a conspiracy of wanton violence. This is the number one concern for the nation at the moment. This is the most vexed issue facing the Guyanese nation. The PNC's response has been to downgrade this concern and elevated the question of police brutality. In terms of practical politics, this will turn out to be a disaster for the PNC.
The PNC as a party, at the official level, has accepted periodic elections as an acceptable international ethic, and participates in such elections as a means of securing state power. The party, at the level of its leadership too, has accepted the Westminister model of government as it currently operates in Guyana, meaning a ruling party with a functioning opposition competing in a polity where democracy, the rule of law and accountability are present. Within this formula then, a party expanding its voter base is a commonsensical adoption. If the PNC wants to win the presidency and a majority in parliament, then with the type of demographic composition Guyana has, and its accompanying inevitable election results, the game for the PNC must be to reassure Indian voters that they have a future with a PNC government. The PNC does the opposite.
What obtains in Guyana at the moment with the PNC is a unique and esoteric case in political history. Opposition parties, though professing adherence to patriotic sentiments, hide but make use of their machiavellian instincts. They milk the weaknesses of the ruling party for the sole purpose of weakening it. In Guyana, in a most bizarre fashion, the opposition's approach to the milking theory is the opposite to convention. The PNC's invisible concern for the victims of murder and violent robberies is so ill-shaped and flawed that instead of weakening the ruling party it makes that party appear to be the victim of PNC conspiracies thus stemming the tide of departing, disenchanted voters in the Indian community. Whoever fails to cling to the loyalty of the PPP because of the reign of terror, transfer their loyalty to Ravi Dev and ROAR. To put it another way then, the PNC's role as an opposition party more helps its enemies rather than its own cause. There has never been another example like this in the political evolution of the West Indies.
Here is a great, historic opportunity for the PNC to do what its political genius Forbes Burnham could not have done - harness the weaknesses of the PPP to its own advantage. It could be argued that Burnham never had the opportunity, Hoyte now has. Burnham was the maximum leader. For Indians to like him, he had to change the nature of his economic and social policy, settle his difference with Jagan and hold free and fair elections. This was political suicide so attempts at appeasement were doomed to fail. Hoyte is in a more strategically advantageous position. He is in the opposition, Jagan and his charisma are no longer alive, a faltering economy falters more each day, the ruling party lacks resources and ideas to create another Trinidad in Guyana, and crime is out of control. A logical direction to head in is to dissect the sufferers of each one of these crisis situations, and interact with them. Instead Hoyte and the PNC chooses to go down the wrong road. So a man gets killed in Buxton, and the PNC leadership appears with eulogies and comforts. Two Indians are murdered in a nearby village, and silence of the PNC is what the villagers hear. How a traditional Westminister styled party facing national elections in four year's time hope to win the election with this lopsided platform is a foregone conclusion.
How do you explain this phenomenon? One type of analysis points to a deep misunderstanding by the PNC of the relationship between the PPP and the people who vote for it. The conclusion arrived at decades ago by the PNC is that this association is a consanguineous one, meaning the Indian people see the PPP as family and will never break ties therefore rapprochement is an impossible dream. Therefore to undermine the viability of the PPP you have to demolish the moral integrity of the Indian population. Secondly, there is a theory that sees a practical side to the role the PNC has pursued since the 97 elections. Reshape the demography of Guyana by engineering perpetual crises in Guyana which can only lead to an Indian exodus thus ensuring a numbers change at the next election. Thirdly, some point to another school of thought unstoppable political protest with its ensuing social disruption may galvanise civil society in Guyana and the international community to demand inclusive government based on far reaching constitutional changes.