A giant has fallen
Navin Chandarpal
Navin Chandarpal

During the heads of missions’ conference in Georgetown in July 2012, my long-standing friend Navin Chandarpal was one of the government leaders who made presentations at the forum when he spoke on his favourite issue of sustainable development and its problems and challenges. A lively discussion with him ensued and it continued even during the refreshment break. As usual, he was his animated self but intently listened absorbingly to varying ideas expressed. On the evening before I departed back to my post, he and his wife Indra dropped in to meet me and my wife at the hotel. Over fruit punches and bowls of peanuts, we chatted for nearly three hours – discussing local politics and reminiscing over events in which we were involved from decades before. During this conversation in which our spouses were also deeply involved, Navin talked about our days at UG, our stints as teachers, our political lives in the leadership of the PYO and the PPP, the strenuous struggle for democracy in the pre-1992 period, his own challenges within the Government, my work as a diplomat and, of course, about our children’s careers. Navin was his usual self – full of humour, animated in his conversation, sharp and forthright in his critiques, but very objective in his analyses.

I mention all of this because Navin was so lively and energetic at that time. I was certainly extremely stunned when I learned just a few months later that he was receiving chemotherapy treatment at the Sloane-Kettering Hospital in New York to battle stomach cancer. He would return to Guyana after a session of treatment and then back again to New York for another round. From time to time, while he was there I telephoned him from Kuwait and he kept me abreast with the progress of his medical treatment. Occasionally, he sent me short emails with further updates.
Through all of this, he remained very positive and between his bouts of medical treatment, he continued to participate in international meetings on sustainable development at the UN, in Barbados, Jamaica and elsewhere. He did not want any physical setback to hold him down. Such was the friend I knew.
Our friendship developed ever since we met for the first time in 1970 when we were first-year students at the University of Guyana (UG). We were both members of the PYO and soon became very active in the organisation’s group on campus. I was later elected chairman of the group and he, as an executive member, was extremely active in campaigning for the group’s candidates in the student council elections. He himself was elected as one of the representatives of the Science faculty and within a year he won the election as president of the student council. This was the period when the student body sponsored monthly political symposiums, involving national political personalities, to discuss the issue of democracy and the struggle against PNC autocratic rule. Obviously, Navin was in the forefront in organising these forums.
The highlight of his career as a student leader occurred when Dr. Walter Rodney was refused employment at the university. Sit-ins and marches could not change the minds of the politically-inspired university board, so Navin came up with what could easily be regarded a political master-stroke. He, with the backing of the student council, invited Dr. Rodney to give a series of public lectures at the university on Guyanese history. These were held in the large lecture theatre to packed audiences. Thus, while the government controlled university board refused to allow the world-renowned Guyanese historian to impart knowledge to Guyanese students, Navin, along with his student council, ensured that, to some extent, this did not happen.
While we attended university classes (which were held in the evenings), we were also teachers at the Indian Education Trust College (IETC) in Georgetown in the early 1970s. He taught physics and mathematics, subjects in which he himself excelled while he was a student at Berbice High School.
Interestingly, Navin developed his trademark beard just before he commenced studies at the university. As far as I can recollect, there was only one time when he shaved off his beard completely, so much so that almost all his colleagues could not immediately recognise him. That was when he was teaching at IETC; he sat quietly in the staff room one Monday morning as a clean-shaven young man before the assembly bell rang, and his teaching colleagues there paid scant attention to him thinking he was just a stranger waiting to meet the principal. It was only when I walked in and said, “What’s happening there, Navin?” did our astounded colleagues realise that he was in their midst all along!
He subsequently moved on to St. Rose’s High School, but we met regularly with other friends at the university, on weekends and at political activities in various parts of the country.
We were both elected to the central committee of the PYO in 1972 and three years later, after he completed his studies at UG, he departed for Moscow where he studied political science. Earlier that year, he was the “best-man” when I got married, and my wife and I still have the photograph of part of the ceremony showing Navin broadly smiling as he stood beside us.
Actually, Navin could easily have pursued higher scientific studies abroad, but he consciously decided to follow a political career within the PPP. He, like many of us, was a keen follower of the ideas and ideals of Dr. Cheddi Jagan, and even before the rigged elections of July 1973, in various forms of political protests, studiously championed the rights of the Guyanese people for democracy and free and fair elections.
But he was remarkably different in his overall outlook as a politician. As a political intellectual, he felt that the struggle had to be enhanced, not just by “amateur” politicians, but by those who were politically trained in that field. Thus, he opted not to pursue post-graduate studies in the natural sciences, but in the area of political science, initially much to the consternation of some of his family members and close friends.
With this training ingrained in him, he moved up in the ranks of the PYO and soon after became the leader of the organisation. Later, within the PPP itself, he proved to be an outstanding member of the central and executive committees. In these capacities, he displayed great astuteness as a political organiser and never shirked his responsibility to meet with his party comrades all over the country. He showed no fear in the face of police repression, especially when many PPP public meetings were broken up by thugs with the police standing idly by. Actually, there was one particular time when he slipped out from the police hands. During the period leading up to the rigged referendum in 1978, he was distributing PPP handbills in the Timehri community when a jeep-load of armed policemen arrested him and took him to the police station. They ordered him to sit on a bench while they went into a back room and paid scant attention to him. Navin, realising after about an hour that the policemen were not in a hurry to check on him, quietly walked out of the station, flagged down a taxi and returned to Georgetown.
At PPP public meetings, he was one of the main PPP speakers and his presence at many of them popularised him immensely with grassroots PPP supporters. At pre-election rallies in 1992 and in subsequent election years he was easily one of the star attractions among those who spoke on the PPP platform.
From 1986 I was away from Guyana but Navin and I maintained regular communication through long letters and telephone conversations. On occasions, I represented the PPP at various international forums and generally it was he, as well as Dr. Cheddi Jagan and Mrs. Janet Jagan, who provided me with instructions and background briefings on issues to be raised. On the day after Dr. Jagan was sworn in as president in October 1992, it was Navin who first reached me on the telephone before he handed it to President Jagan who told me that it was time for me to return home.
Navin totally involved himself in government activities from 1992 but he still maintained his political work among the grassroots. As a premier activist in the field of sustainable development, he was my constant contact on this significant subject when I served as Guyana’s ambassador to the United States. I also participated with him in meetings at the OAS and the World Bank in Washington, and away from these forums we exchanged ideas on strategies that could be applied to promote the advancement of sustainable development and the protection of the environment. Suffice it to add, he was a consummate writer on political and environmental matters and his writings especially on the latter are widely referenced by researchers in that field.
It remains my opinion that Navin was not too comfortable in the position as agriculture minister since he probably felt that made him more of a bureaucrat than the politician he was. To my mind, he was much more comfortable as presidential advisor since this provided more opportunities to pursue his political work among the masses. No doubt, like so many of us, he must have been terribly dismayed when he was dismissed from this post at the Office of the President, but felt some satisfaction when GAWU made use of his political expertise to administer the union’s training school, and, of course, his subsequent reinstatement to his presidential advisory post.
The last time I saw him was in May last year when he was receiving treatment in New York. My wife and I visited him at his aunt’s residence in Brooklyn where he was staying while receiving out-patient’s attention. Despite his illness, he was excited to see us and was his usual jovial self, even cracking jokes as we chatted. He talked of his love for his children, Rabin and Geeta, and especially for his dear wife Indra, his political comrade of more than three decades. By that time, he had lost much body-weight, but he still maintained a positive attitude that the chemotherapy could reverse his illness. Later, from Kuwait, I maintained sporadic telephone contact with him whenever he was in New York but was unfortunate in not being able to speak with him during his final trip four months ago.
Sadly, my dear friend and comrade has now departed forever from us. Among the patriots of our country, a giant has fallen. But the political beliefs he stood for will stand the test of time and his memory will forever continue to bloom in the hearts of all who knew him so well.

(By Odeen Ishmael)

(Dr. Odeen Ishmael served as Ambassador of Guyana from 1993 to 2014 successively in the USA, Venezuela, Kuwait and Qatar.)

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