IT’S hard to write about racism and racist politics in Guyana, because the topic is so politically charged, with a long and painful history. But I think we should also not feel intimidated by this spectre, because it can be overcome with consistency, even though this may force us to ask hard questions. And the hardest question is perhaps this one: how were the British able to rule India with a population of over 300 million at the time, when there were only 66,000 troops there? This must mean that there are strategies which racist politics cannot effectively counteract.

Sometimes in politics you have to do a bad thing in order to do a good thing, and I believe the answer to definitively banishing racist politics from Guyana lies in examining the horrors of the strategy the British used in India. The only way for Guyana to truly be free lies in undoing the damage done by our former colonial rulers, whose divide-and-rule tactics were at their zenith in India. We must look at divide and rule in a different way.
At its core, divide and rule is about exclusion- someone must be excluded from resources, so that the coloniser can extract those resources from the local economy. The purpose of division is to ensure that unlucky group is unable to fight back by uniting with its peers. It is intuitive that the coloniser does this by pitting the interests of one group against the other– as an example by taking resources from one and giving a portion to the other. To reduce the resources needed to keep these groups apart, colonisers exploited existing differences, which in India meant religion and in Guyana means race.

Needless to say, it has been alleged that this led to the eventual partitioning of India, and Guyana’s enduring racial divisions. But if unjustly taking resources from one group led to this political problem, shouldn’t doing the opposite remedy it? Thus have stemmed the typical calls for peace and unity locally, but I think this perhaps misunderstands what is truly required to reverse this damage. After all, Pakistan and India remain bitter enemies, and race relations seem not to have completely cooled locally.

Unity is not the original state of the Indian sub-continent, and by no means is that region ethnically homogeneous, as is often falsely claimed. The Muslim Mughal dynasty, which ruled before the British Raj, was ethnically different from the local Hindu population, which was itself split into many sub-groups. And due to India’s vast population, a sub-group often constitutes tens of millions of people who speak very different languages. There is no such thing as a united, homogeneous Indian subcontinent, but there is a harmonious Indian subcontinent, and that is the true goal.

It is not that there should be no groups at all in Guyana, but that wherever possible we should discourage unhealthy groupings in politics and encourage healthy ones. Here is a simple example: If you sat a rice farmer and sugar worker down at a table and put a million US dollars in front of them, under the understanding that only one industry could benefit from the funds, I bet two rice farmers would get up with that cash. In the course of negotiation, the rice farmer whose industry is productive, must surely win over the sugar farmer, whose industry is just the opposite. Because these two groups are porous, the sugar worker can simply change industries, diffusing the conflict.

But if I sit persons of Indian and African descent down, and say only one of the two can get that money, what do you think will happen? It’s not as if the Indian person can suddenly become African. Colonisers exploit differences in this way and it is our task now to recognise the difference between these two approaches to divide and rule. One is a means of oppression, the other salvation. Put another way, we should strive to structure politics in Guyana according to economic interests and governance philosophies, rather than ethnic origins.

This would truly undo the damage done us by our colonists, as we would more and more live in a society of difference but harmony, just as India was pre-British rule. In Guyana’s politically charged environment is this possible? Perhaps that question should be asked another way. What is to stop wise local politicians from sitting the leaders of the rice and sugar industries down and telling them only one industry can benefit from oil revenues? As in the example above, everyone will get up from that table a rice farmer.

If the administration does this, given its strong support in the Afro-Guyanese community, this will mean cross-race harmony and the further degradation of the historic Indo-Guyanese coalition. Even further, given the leader of the opposition said if elected he would pay retrenched sugar workers salaries from oil resources until they find new employment (which could be never), there is a significant barrier to the race-based coalition reforming. After all, doesn’t every Indo-Guyanese rice farmer who was going to justly benefit from those many oil millions have an incentive not to support a group which is going to just give their money away to Indo-Guyanese sugar workers?

Maybe both Indo-Guyanese groups will not realise that their interests are totally opposed. Maybe the rice farmers will simply decide wealth and prosperity are not for them. Or, maybe all the rice farmers will stay home and refuse to vote for the PPP/C, pulling them into another electoral loss and banishing race-based politics for good. A friend of mine rightly pointed out that the former President should have instead said there is a chronic need for unemployment insurance, and we should use oil money to change this; on some level, I think this is what he was really trying to say.

My suspicion is that this statement, however, made so long before the 2020 elections, will so box the PPP/C into huge financial commitments easy to paint as race-based they will face significant hurdles whenever they campaign. After all, won’t coalition supporters just say the PPP/C cannot promise you anything because they already promised all the oil money to sugar workers? Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. There are thus ways to consistently defeat race-based politics, even though they require a painful look into past colonial rule. I feel somehow that it is the duty of all responsible Guyanese leaders to force these changes, lest we slip back into the bad habits of the past.