The ethnic issue has always played a major role in our elections. Both PPP and the PNC have in their own ways appealed to the ethnic sentiment of their base support. In every general election, excepting those between 1964 and 1992, which were blatantly rigged by the PNC, race was the deciding factor. Perhaps the best example of ethnic loyalty was seen in the 1992 general elections. Even after years of atrocities against its own supporters, not to speak of the supporters of the other major party, the results showed that the PNC received almost 100% African votes.
Indians, too, voted race; but it is they who have been denounced and have had to pay a heavy price for their choice. One top WPA leader, who now resides happily and comfortably in the “belly of the beast”, told me in strong theological language that Indians needed to be “rebuked.” To date, I have never heard a call to rebuke Africans for the same “crime,” race voting.
Tragically, this mindset of blaming Indians for their “ethnic preference” has continued to the present time with many people berating Indians for their political choice at every election, the present election being no exception. Some columnists and commentators have made it a kind of industry to single out Indians for abuse and have gone so far as to advocate punishment for Indians. Some dehumanize and punish Indians with their pens in newspaper columns, while others do it on the streets.
The sum of what we are being told is when Africans vote for the PNC they are asserting “ethnic pride.” When Indians vote for the PPP, it is racism. This hegemonic narrative is dominant and widespread. The production, preservation, reproduction, propagation and inculcation of this discourse that grants carte blanche legitimacy and sanctity to African ethnic expression, paradoxically and simultaneously, seeks to demonise and delegitimise similar ethnic expressions of the Indian community.
One of the most perplexing phenomena of modern political life in Guyana is the that authors and originators of this discourse of asymmetry, are lionised and praised for giving expressions to the African ethnic pride and aspirations, while those who seek to engage in an articulation, however erratically and unsystematically, of an Indian ethnic pride are devilised and denounced by the very propagators of the African ethnic discourse as Indian supremacists and diabolical racists. Virtue in one is vice in the other.
The outcome of this systematic intellectual and cultural indoctrination, hegemonisation and domination has been two-fold. On the one han, it has led to the virtual total absence of an Indian discourse among Indian intellectuals and politicians. Where, for example, is the Indian counterpart of the view, “that my activism is dedicated to the defence and furtherance of African Guyanese interests?” Such an Indian, if he dares to speak, will be vilified and ostrasized, in part, by the very authors of the African ethnic discourse.
The second outcome of this hegemonisation has been the creation of a larger number of de-culturalised and de-ethnicised Indians who have long learned to “ignore their normal ethnic considerations,” who have internalised the oppression, who now place themselves in the forefront of the vilification of Indians and who are elevated and celebrated as “model Indians.”
Having declared their shame of being Indian, they make it their duty to humiliate, vilify, denigrate, demonise Indians who, in their view, fit the bill of being “Indian supremacists.” Silencing any Indian who entertains even the pretension of speaking about “ethnic honour,” “ethnic pride” etc., of Indian people is the pre-eminent duty of this class.
The hegemonist ideology goes like this. The Indians of Guyana, the vast majority of whom trace their origins to the lowest social stratum in India, have inherited “bizarre ideologies of racist oppression,” which have been imported to Guyana and which have bedeviled ethnic relations from the very inception. Indians are characterised by this group as triumphalist and clannish and one of their major crimes is to resist inter-racial marriage, which resistance, as one hegemonised convert contends, is routinely preached in (Hindu) temples.
The caricature continues. A huge defect in the Indian character is the “emphasis of wealth accumulation.” They want money, because “money is the essence of life,” and from Crabwood Creek to Charity they inhabit the biggest houses which they do not mind abandoning as they flee to North America, another crime.
But above all, the worst crime of the Indians in this country is their “loyalty to the PPP,” for which no punishment is enough. Because Indians also choose to assert their “ethnic honour” in not abandoning the PPP, we are given an analysis of the “nature of the Indian psyche.” We hear of the “lacerated psyche of the Guyanese Indians.” And, to cap it all, we are informed that, “the nature of the Hindu religion has had a traumatising effect on the Indian psyche.” The fallacy of equating Hindu and Indian does not dawn on this analyst.
As Maya Angelou puts it, these are “words armed for slaughter. Nothing more needs to be said.
Swami Aksharananda