RONALD Daniels, a lawyer with the firm of Nigel Hughes has written a nasty piece on Geeta Chandan who has left the PNC for the PPP. Ms Chandan was treated like a chandala by Daniels and the same treatment is going around for Daniel Seeram, the Region Four chairman who left the PNC for the PPP last week.

The man whose job is to desecrate the human standing of people who are Indians and who feels psychologically pained when the Indian race is culturally abused in Guyana is David Hinds. It is when a WPA personality spoke of the Indian race in Guyana as being chandalas not worthy of high status that Ms Chandan replied and defended the ethnic community she belonged to.
For her defence of her culture, David Hinds heaped a mountain of insults on her. The high-caste people in the Mulatto/Creole class found silence a convenient resort. They said not one word in condemnation of what the WPA person said about the Indian race in Guyana. When it happened, I expected two WPA persons to chastise both the WPA lady and David Hinds.

Those two persons were Alissa Trotz who edits the Stabroek News column, ‘In The Diaspora” and Walter Rodney’s wife who wrote to demand that Guyana should not have accepted then Brazilian president, Bolsonaro because Afro-Brazilians are discriminated against in Brazil.

Here is what Daniels wrote:  “Chandan reminds me of Charandass. There is nothing moral, bold, or heroic about what they have done. Neither of them was motivated purely by a simple desire to direct their support elsewhere. They were both motivated, in significant part, by a vicious desire to disrespect, disgrace, and crumble the Coalition and the PNC.”
If Daniels had dug deep into human psychology, he would understand why people leave the marriage they were in, whether it is to a person, organisation, or country.  They leave because that entity or that person is not the philosophical substance it was when the marriage took place.

Jane divorces Sugrim because that was not the person she married five years ago. Harry leaves his organisation that he founded with others after five years because that was not the entity he helped to birth and so it goes. There is nothing esoteric about that aspect of human logic that Daniels should find incomprehensible.

Charrandass entered into a covenant with a party named the Alliance For Change (AFC). It wore a certain type of clothes; it used a certain type of fertiliser to grow a particular type of roses; it played certain songs that became the party’s anthem. Charandass, as he continued to live with this organism, saw that this was not the organism he once embraced. –  “this is a different thing that I don’t like. I am gone, man.”
Now, without being insulting to Daniels, maybe he does not have the vision to see when a marriage is faltering. Charrandass did, Chandan did. Chandan, as an Indian woman, did not enter the kingdom of a party named the People’s Progressive Party. He chose a party named the People’s National Congress. She liked what she saw. She believed in what she saw.

Chandan left in 2025 because that was not the party she once embosomed. The crucial point Daniels missed is that the PNC in 2025 is not the PNC in 2020 that Chandan married. Daniels left out a huge, almost colossal chunk of current Guyanese history when he failed to understand why Charrandass and Chandan walked.

Charrandass bolted from the AFC because they betrayed the nation. As a parliamentarian representing Berbice, Charrandass had to hear from other people that his party fired 9000 sugar workers. So he believed that he was used and abused by a party he belonged to. The morally right thing to do was to atone to the Guyanese people and he did. One hopes Daniels is not so unfortunate that he cannot see the betrayal of his party, APNU+AFC.
Chandan left the PNC because she no longer recognised that organisation as having a multi-racial biology. Daniels’ political comrade, David Hinds, called Chandan a slave-catcher because she objected to the assignment of chandala status to the Indian people of Guyana by a WPA activist, and the party she belonged to saw nothing wrong with such a horrific manifestation of racism.

Daniels wrote the following about the PNC after Chandan’s exodus. “Losing those who are not good for us will, in retrospect, be our biggest gain.” Only Daniels cannot see that not only the PNC is losing leaders, but the PNC has lost its soul and is no longer the PNC but something else. Chandan, in a conversation on the seawall, hinted at that to me. Daniels should learn from her exit.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.