ATTEMPTS to institutionalise any race in perpetual suffering more than others can only be a subtle attempt to establish both a legitimacy and right to first preference entitlements. Not only does it completely demean African magnificence, but it relegates them to a dependency by its conception, repetition, advocacy and more implications. To operate some 175 years after emancipation insisting that slave descendants remain shackled in mental strictures that impede their well-being while the descendants of indentured labourers ( Portuguese, Indians, Chinese and Amerindians (PICA) have gotten over it and moved on can only be counter productive as it is self-damning.

Fortifying any debilitating mental entombment as legitimate in a Caribbean context cannot be acceptable, but only guarantees a set up where some are racially ensured first-class entitlements, others with second choices and still others who are silent with no entitlement rights at all in the ‘national patrimony.’ By promoting that slaves suffered more, first-entitlement rights accrue automatically.
Exulting that African ownership (Prof Rex Nettleford) of the
Caribbean, when the colonials departed, was automatic is guaranteeing that all other ethnic groups remain second fiddlers. Inevitably, and without any inclusive debate or agreement Guyanese are most definitely not destined for any unity or shared governance whatsoever regardless
of our “One people, One Nation, One Destiny” motto or by any other criterion. By its rosy ‘unity and human development” banner which the PNC seeks political power through a Trojan horse bait (which no one cannot deny is desirable), it is still employing trickery in counterfeit advertising.
How does anyone measure the inhumanity of sufferance? Before slaves came to the Caribbean, they had historically enjoyed God-given freedom to be themselves in their native natural forest habitat. So what then made Indians the usual favourite targets to be brutalised and plundered by successive invaders for hundreds of years? The expansionist Alexander of
Macedonia conquerors, invading Mughals, France’s Pondichary, Portugal’s Goa, British colonialists and of course Christopher Columbus all found India desirous.
Under foreign occupation for seeming eternity, Indians were all damaged goods hammered by successive foreign
subjugation into lower economic castes and poverty. For an Indian to break the cultural taboo of crossing the ocean only added to their sunken self-esteem, making them further stigmatised when they eventually arrived as confirmed labouring damaged goods. They were the last choice picked when all else failed. Returning to India only sunk
them lower on the outcast ladder. Conscripted by grandiose promises into indentureship, on arrival, they were relegated to mud logies with open pit latrines as their homes. The freed, unpaid slaves had moved on from this and bought plantations. Working daily under the hot sun, under the same slave masters from whom the slaves had become permanently emancipated was not easy. Their colonial masters were still
the same in British colonies.
However Indians, unlike the Portuguese and Chinese who left the plantation, were to incur the additional resentment of the freed slaves who saw them as interlopers undermining their rights. Has anything changed drastically (which is redeeming) in the resentment and sporadic wrath directed at Indians’ presence? Can resentment targeting Chinese upward mobility be justified or condoned?

Slavery was undoubtedly dehumanising and a heinous crime to impose on human beings. But the European mentality which imposed it did not become overnight magnanimous masters who were inclined to anymore tolerate any financial losses from Indians so soon after their Portuguese and Chinese identures abandoned the plantations. Such
debilitating events can therefore only be best understood within its own ethno-centric historical narrative; not slavery versus indenturedship by which Afro-centric advocacy remains ensnarled. To continue embracing such a fallacy only accentuates and prolongs Guyana’s race animosities however it is viewed. Discontinuing it, cannot make it any worse.

Abu Bakr and other Afro-centric protagonists must therefore cease this measuring scale of the weight of pain of slavery comparing it to indentureship and assuming that one group has won the boxing match because of whatever. (SN Sept, 27, 2013. ’The races deal with history differently’). It just cannot be measured and conclusions are mostly deducted in the absence of unavailable, non-presented hard evidence.
Constantly, comparisons which ignore where any group has advanced not in absolute or even universal terms, but in relation to other races only continue to reflect a distorted picture. With African perceptions entitling themselves as the natural primary inheritors of the Caribbean ( Rex Nettleford) how hollow is any notion offering and demanding any equality or shared governance when the primary motive is not repudiated or readjusted, but remains fixed in slavish embrace and finality?
What is wrong and excites resentments is measuring and judging one’s achievements by that of others races’ successes. It begins to percolate and becomes more grievious fanned into riotous protests with all its destructive consequences and then expecting consoling satisfaction in monetary relief from taxpayers’ money.
Whatever are Abu Bakr’s motives, he only adds insult to injury by his bizarre insistence that not all (PICA) indentured servants, but especially Indians only began suffering only with indentureship with its termination in the re-election of the PPP/C in 1992. Apparently, the successive foreign invasion and brutality imposed on Indians or Chinese, before they arrived does not matter. Subsequent PNC misrule and
atrocities are dismissed as miniscule and insignificant. Even Bakr seems in doubt. He suggests that Afro=Guyanese only can graduate from “tribulation to triumph” when they collectively hold political power and ‘pun top’. Such is the desirable euphoric closure versus ‘something else for others.’ Demanding partition has not been repudiated but has now become recalibrated into shared governance entitlement.

Failing to effectively undermine or debunk Annan Boodram’s candidness which explains that Indians are no less deprived as Africans, Bakr excuses it by suggesting that it is trivial as Indians hold political power as their ‘palliative’ cure. That would imply the PPP/C government is a failure in not prioritising Indian interests as paramount, similar to what the PNC ‘medicine’ did for black people when they were
in government! Could any PPP/C perceived negligence account for increased Indian apathy and their reaction in the 2011 elections? The amusing irony is that Bakr as an Afro-centric advocate never found anything wrong in the PNC stacking the public service and armed forces with its supporters. But suddenly he now laments that Africans are trapped therein with no chance of redeeming or equal possibilities!
“The Afro-Guyanese, equally shipwrecked, but in the strictures of the public service, does not see himself with equal possibilities. He suffers a sense of deprivation (of future possibility) in an additional way’. Shouldn’t the PNC bear the blame and responsibility?

Completely ignoring the PNC’s policies which locked out Indo- Guyanese from the civil service and armed forces, Bakr then lectures Boodram how he “needs to bear in mind that suffering in its objective sense is due not to prejudicial and racist action (whatever the mindless propaganda says), but to the structural and historical factors” which Bakr now unashamedly sanitises. What choices did Indians have except to go into private business even as the majority remained in agriculture? Like their rescuing of the seashore mangroves, they still made a success of both despite all odds thrown against them.

In fact, what is more important to Bakr is ‘perception’ and not statistics. However, there can be no doubt that we agree somewhat.
Bakr’s advocates urgency ‘for changes in the constitutional
arrangement and in what I have called ‘the architecture of the state,’(to) represent the only permanent solutions.’
No doubt since it is totally taxpayer funded, we must constitutionally ensure that the armed forces are racially balanced. We both favour government decentralization, but any shared government which he proposes is only temporary and will definitely not work nor endure. Federalism is the
best solution within a united Guyana.

That Bakr can accept that Indians are the targets of increasing crimes, suicides, alcoholism and domestic violence is generous, despite rebuking Boodram’s bravery in insisting that it be on the agenda. Now we must all ponder by what fantasy or by what magic formula now in the PNC’s possession can Bakr expect ‘for nothing in the world will they (Indians) change for a suicide-free world under the PNC’! In the marketplace of politics offering ‘nothing’ for ‘something’ is still found attractive by some Guyanese when they cross over.

VASSAN RAMRACHA