IN an interview with the Chronicle to be broadcast on the newspaper’s Facebook page at 6:00 pm/18:00 hrs today, the host asked me how I have handled all the criticism over the decades. My response is dear to my heart, mind and soul. It never bothered me and it never will. The surest way to the lunatic asylum is to be concerned about the things people say about you.

Last Friday, I was deluged with screenshots from the Facebook page of editor in-chief at the Stabroek News (SN) referring to me as a PPP lapdog after I asked him to appear on the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show. I don’t have a Facebook page, so I didn’t know about his remarks until the items were sent to me. When I saw the denouncing comments in reaction to Mr. Persaud’s insult of me on his own Facebook page, I know there is a solid appreciation out there for my work.

Unapologetically, I prefer being a PPP lapdog than a lapdog of the Mulatto/Creole class that owns and operates SN. I prefer to be a PPP lapdog than have any association with sections of this society that do not want to see dark-skinned Indians, and Hindu and Muslim Indians in control of the Government of Guyana.

All my life, I have seen this cultural contempt, and if I am a lapdog of the PPP maybe the anti-Indian elites that once ruled British Guiana and post-Independent Guyana drove me in that direction.

The remark by SN’s editor has tremendous journalistic and political implications that show the sordid side of Guyanese society. Let’s examine these implications.

1-First, I am not an employee of the state so I have no reason to sing for my supper.
2- My Chronicle columns are done without payment. I want to use the columns as a struggle against those, who since March 2020, reject the PPP in government because of anti-Indian sentiments that are bound up with class and colour.
3- I say without concern for those who think I am a PPP lapdog that I think Dr. Irfaan Ali is a transformational president and will leave an impressive legacy.
4- The lapdog comment has exposed the so-called independent media. Any examination of the use of the term points to someone being sycophantic. If the lapdog label fits me, does the tag apply to others? The General-Secretary, Kian Jabour, of the opposition party, ANUG told to his fellow ANUG colleague Mr. Timothy Jonas that News Room, over the past three years, has not said anything critical of the government. So, I told Jonas that for the past three years, all the SN editorials have been against the government.

Now, if I am pro-government, and that makes me a lapdog for the PPP, why is Mr. Persaud not a lapdog for the opposition? Why those who write in favour of the government are lapdogs and those who hate the government and publishes that hate are not lapdogs of a different kind?

SN has two columnists who supported the March 2020 election rigging, have an open African agenda and in every column since the PPP government came into power in August 2020, have been writing poisonous condemnations of the government. Not one column has been neutral. All have been anti-government. Are they, together with Mr. Persaud, not lapdogs?

5- How do the so-called guardians of morality in Guyana feel about the use of such terms to describe other media practitioners? Are they going to chastise Mr. Persaud for the low level he descended to? The answer is no for two reasons. One is that they are afraid themselves that they will be banned like Professor Randolph Persaud from the pages of SN. And two, they openly embrace a shameless school of double standards, where one set of behavioural rules apply to members of the government and a different set for them.

6- The lapdog remark should open the eyes to all decent Guyanese in and out of the country of the kind of instincts that have been unleashed since March 2020, where the government is so hated that the independent media and civil society have steeped so far in journalistic and political vulgarization and patriotic miasma that there is a huge struggle to save democracy from these people.

I informed Mr. Jonas that former President, Barack Obama in an interview with CBS lamented the slanted direction of the media in the US, and that a poll taken by three prestigious institutions found that a majority thinks that the media is a threat to American democracy. The US does not have state-owned media. Finally, the lapdog insult against me should warn the PPP what it will be up against in 2025.