WRITING in Kaieteur News on May 3rd, 4th and 5th, Freddie Kissoon chastised Indians in Guyana who have come out in support of the PPP and who have not expressed a preference for the PNC/APNU+AFC and who have not, according to him, recognised African Guyanese leaders.He has also launched a litany of assininities against former President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo, accusing him of racist demagoguery. I recall that former President Jagdeo sued Kissoon for a similar scandalous attack. I don’t know if there is an injunction against Kissoon which prohibits the repetition of such unfounded labels. If there is, these comments on Mr Jagdeo would mark Kissoon’s grave insult and disrespect for the court and its order, but that is a matter for Mr Jagdeo and his lawyers.
I would however like to focus on Kissoon’s drivel about Indians who support the PPP. He referred to Ronald Bulkan, whom he said is transfixed by “the transmogrification of a number of Indian Guyanese who just months ago found the PPP regime to be characterised by cascading incompetence, corruptibility, unpleasant functionalism and other unacceptable motifs.”
I am surprised that there is no attempt at an evaluation/analysis of the current stand of the persons who have caused Ronald Bulkan’s transfixation at their transmogrification. Such an evaluation/analysis would be the first recourse for objective political analysts. To be fair to Kissoon, he has offered that these Indians have allowed themselves to be influenced by instinctive racial considerations.
He sees these Indians as ‘Indian Supremacists’ who hold to the view that Indians must hold political power in Guyana. He gleefully admits to what would be his delight at the PPP loss of the forthcoming elections. There is no disputing the truth that there are African Guyanese who want to see the APNU-AFC led by David Granger in government. By Kissoon’s logic, would he describe Lincoln Lewis, David Hinds, Lenno Craig, Norris Witter, Aubrey Norton and Joe Harmon as ‘African Supremacists’. There is not a word from Kissoon on this.
The truth is Mr. Kissoon, leading Indian personalities have been critical of the PPP when they felt justified in doing so. The PPP is not above criticism. The PPP itself has candidly admitted that in government it has made mistakes. The persons who bear the brunt of Kissoon’s criticism are entitled, like all other eligible Guyanese, to vote for the political party of their choice. These Indians, like all other Indian Guyanese, have vivid recollections of the brutal, vicious, oppressive and authoritarian record of the PNC in government.
They are well aware that Indians in particular bore the brunt of PNC neglect, victimisation and oppression in the past. It may be that by offering their support to the PPP, they have resolved unto themselves that they will go with the PPP. That, notwithstanding their past criticism, they will choose the lesser of two evils. Kissoon may not agree with them, but it is their choice, and as a man holding himself out as a defender of public rights, he should respect their choice.
Ronald Bulkan is also critical of the Indians he identified, but Bulkan is guilty of a terrible error of judgment. He seems to have erroneously concluded that the criticism of the PPP by intellectually able Indians necessarily translated into their support for APNU. But Bulkan too is guilty of a lack of respect for people like Rhyaan Shah, Swami Ashkarananda, Ralph Seeram, Peter Ramsaroop, Asgar Ally and others. If these Indians had followed in the footsteps of people like Ronald Bulkan, and his uncle, the former PNC Attorney General Mohamed Shahabudin, on the road to Sophia and into Congress Place, Bulkan and Kissoon would have considered them right thinking Indians and above criticism.

Note must be taken of how APNU, in the newspapers, plays up the photographs of Indians who have made a political choice of supporting APNU, viz. Robert Badal, Joey Jagan, Jacob Rambarran and an unknown doctor.
Freddie Kissoon should dilate on the fact that when Indians in Guyana reflect on their experiences under the PNC, when they reflect on their disadvantage and their deprivations; when they consider that the PNC government was one that imposed itself upon them through electoral fraud of the most barefaced and worst kind; when they think of poor health care and the substandard education their children received in run-down schools with teachers pre-occupied with selling tamarind balls to their knowledge-starved students sitting on classroom floors because the PNC failed to provide classroom furniture; when they think of the pot-holed ridden roads all across the country; when they remember that their children, undoubtedly qualified, could not get employment with the PNC government; when they reflect on the fact that food and medicine were unavailable; when they, in anguish, recall the police charging into their mandirs and homes at the time of religious worship and taking away their puri and parsaad and putting them before the courts; when they remember that flour, bread and roti had to be buried in the backyard; when they recall the lack of a democratic culture that characterised the PNC in government, it is difficult for them to avoid the conclusion that the PNC did them a great wrong and that they were treated unjustly.
These recollections, for Indians, are painful ones. These were the realities that have scarred and left indelible prints on the Indian Guyanese psyche. So in coming now to their political choice, Indians weigh the admission of the PPP that it has made mistakes and its undertaking to correct them against David Granger’s unambiguous and remorseless statement that the PNC did no wrong and that there is nothing that the PNC has to apologise for to the people of Guyana. Why, Mr. Kissoon, should any Guyanese, and Indians in particular, vote for David Granger, who seeks to distance himself from overt connection with PNC atrocities and even today, fails to offer a word of condemnation. Indian Guyanese in particular would find themselves in great difficulty to support David Granger and his motley band of vengeance seeking wannabees.
This is the context in which Indian support for the PPP can be placed, and not just through the narrow prism of racial polarisation. Kissoon may disagree, but it is my view, and I trust that he can show some respect for my view. The very matters such as incompetence and corruptibility which Ronald Bulkan claims Indians criticise the PPP for, have been prominent features of the notorious record of the PNC in government. There is however one fact which Kissoon, with his poisoned pen, with his anti-indian hostility, and vitriol, cannot deny, and that is that under the present PPP government, the life and living standards of all Guyanese are qualitatively superior to that which obtained under the despotic PNC regime.
Freddie Kissoon has, in the past, heaped encomiums upon Desmond Hoyte. I respect his right to choose his heroes, but I ask Kissoon about his thoughts on the fact that Hoyte took the Presidency in 1985 as a result of the most flagrantly rigged elections in Guyana, which prompted the distinguished British Law Lord, Lord Avebury, to describe the 1985 elections “as crooked as barbed wire”.
Kissoon speaks of Hoyte as a great reformer. He must be a great admirer of Robin Hood, the thief of Sherwood Forest in England who shared his ill-gotten gain, with the less privileged. Hoyte stole the Presidency. He ignored the people and their votes. He stole the Government and then sought to adopt glasnost and perestroika, according to Kissoon. How can praise be offered to Hoyte? I do however understand that for Kissoon, stealing can be explained away and can be made acceptable.
Kissoon has described former President Jagdeo as a racist. The former President recently addressed an essentially Indian audience at an essentially Indian function. He told them that they, in the past, struggled for the protection and preservation of their dignity and that that achievement was under threat as the PNC, cloaked as APNU, and led by David Granger, who is unapologetic for the past injustices of the PNC, sought to regain political office. Former President Jagdeo no doubt had in mind the experiences of Indians in Guyana under the past illegal PNC regime, when Indian religious and other cultural values were trampled upon. (Of course I understand that these are matters which Kissoon, by his own admission that he is Guyanese, and not Indian, would care little about). How could such a caution be deemed racially divisive. It was a caution founded on a truthful, historical reality which his audience knows only too well, and which they were grateful to be relieved of in 1992.
Lest Mr. Editor, you are tempted to come to the conclusion that this letter itself may carry racially divisive overtones, I hasten to say that it offers another view of Kissoon’s Kaieteur News contribution that Indian support for the PPP is founded upon purely racial considerations. I have endeavoured to place the continued support by Indians in Guyana for the PPP in a sociological/political context for which support Kissoon is grossly disrespectful to them.
And while I have tried to place the Indian political choice in context and perspective, I would like to immediately add that while it receives the overwhelming support of the indian community in Guyana, the PPP has demonstrated significant multi-ethnic appeal, and continues to enjoy wide support from people of all walks of life and races of Guyana. Kissoon was wrong in his predictions of 2006 and 2011, when he wrote “my take is that the PPP will lose the elections.”
Come May 11th, the people of Guyana will return the PPP to Government and will once again prove Freddie Kissoon wrong, and he will slither away to lunch with Lenno Craig or Lincoln Lewis or David Hinds or Norris Witter or Moses Nagamootoo. But perhaps Nagamootoo will not be available. He is likely to be in the embrace of David Granger and together they will be bawling over their devastating defeat by the PPP.

DAVID MUNIAN