WHEN I started the Freddie Kissoon-Gildarie Show, I said to journalist Leonard Gildarie that I hoped that the programme would contribute in valuable ways to Guyana’s historiography. I wanted unknown and unmentioned facts that should be part of Guyana’s history to be recorded.

I believe I have accomplished that. Historians can look back at the failure of the Alliance For Change in power; so many people in the AFC have explained it on the show. I remember Ravi Dev telling us on the show that Rupert Roopnaraine told him he was more mentally comfortable among African Guyanese than Indians. Roopnaraine was obviously echoing his Mullato/Creole cultural upbringing.

Former Prime Minister Samuel Hinds said something on the programme that he never mentioned before in his long career. It was brought out in my column of Friday, March 8, 2024, “Shocking revelation by former Prime Minister Sam Hinds.” Researchers of the history of Indians and their presence in Guyana now have the Sam Hinds’s revelation that they can cite.

The year was 1990. This was 22 years after the Portuguese and Mulatto/Creole folks took winged impulse after 1968 when The PNC ousted the Portuguese political part, the United Force, from power. Fearing eventual erasure from Guyana’s cultural and economic life, they left en-mass for the UK and Canada.

A pressure group named Guyana Action for Reform and Democracy (GUARD) was formed to agitate for free and fair elections. Hinds related that as GUARD’s success kept widening and the 1992 election looked likely to be free and fair, half of those associated with GUARD expressed fear of a PPP victory and argued that culturally, the Indians in the PPP were unsuitable to govern Guyana.

Hinds has kept me to secrecy, but he named a few of them and I am not surprised. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of them despite his age writes editorials for the Stabroek News.

The date of GUARD’s birth has tremendous analytical value for understanding the trials and tribulations of the Indian descendants of indentured labourers who came to work on the sugar plantations. If in 1990, the Indians were being denied their rightful place in Guyana, then the imagination is bound to expand beyond boundaries when you think of how Indians were treated from the 1930s onwards.

A racist, anti-Indian member of the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) wrote a column in the Stabroek News three years ago asserting that African Guyanese have historically faced discrimination in Guyana. The term vulgarisation is too mild to describe that assault of Guyanese historical sociology. Actually, it is the Indians who should be described as such.

Indians from the time they arrived in this country have been treated with anthropological disdain by all the other ethnic groups in the colony of British Guiana. It is only a few years back that I discovered that of all people, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, had opposed the franchise for Indians.

Interestingly, in common parlance, we hear the term, “yuh ain’t ready yet” quite often in Guyana. Way back in the 1940s, it was Critchlow who first used the term when the Colonial Office was thinking of giving Indians the franchise. He said; “they are not ready yet.”

Swami Aksharananda speaking on the Freddie Kissoon-Gildarie Show said that the Freudian motive for opening up his Hindu school in Cornelia Ida goes back to the complaint of his friend at Queen’s College in the 1960s, when MCC students would taunt him about his coconut-oil hair.

Of course, it is common knowledge from Guyanese generation to generation that to survive in Georgetown, Indians had to give their children Christian names. It explains why I am named Frederick and my brothers, Harold and Joseph.

Does the Freudian revulsion in MCC folk for Indian people and Indian culture and the mental rejection of them being intellectually and anthropologically ineligible to administer a Caribbean country still exist? The answer is a reverberating yes. In the March 16, 2024 Stabroek News editorial, there were laughing words about the bad grammar of the leaders of government. In 2023, the co-owner of the Stabroek News, Isabelle DeCaires ridiculed the clothes the President wore to meet a visiting Middle East leader.

Grammar and choice of clothes have been the two items for which the MCC people and other ethnic groups since the 1940s have singled out Indians for ridicule. In 2023 and 2024, I have given you evidence where that contempt still exists. Interestingly, the President at the Babu Jaan commemoration of Dr. Jagan’s death anniversary made reference to those two insults.

The insults will not end but come 2025, Guyana will have an Indian President, Dr. Ali, who has composed an impressive curriculum vitae of reaching out to Guyanese of all ethnicities.