LAST week, I concluded a three-part series on the evolution of the relationship between the Mulatto/Creole Class (MCC) and the political parties they founded.
The series concluded with the creation of the Alliance For Change (AFC) by the MCC. The congenital weakness in reflecting on complex political issues in a newspaper column is space constraint.
The Khemraj Ramjattan presence in the AFC is a very formidable topic to pursue. You cannot do justice to it in a mere newspaper article.
A caveat is in order. MCC personalities throughout Guyanese history have not been politically bright people.
They may be good in their respective professions but they do not excel in political thinking. It is the academics, political observers and trade unionists who interact with MCC personalities that bring political strategies into play.
When Raphael Trotman embraced David Granger’s theory that political changes can come if the political landscape can have the presence of a middle class third party like in the 1950s, he honestly believed that it was a brilliant move so he acted on it.
Trotman and his AFC acolytes formed the AFC for the AFC to be a MCC outfit. They paid no attention as to how a narrow class-based party can bring about a PPP defeat.
Because Ramjattan and Trotman developed a closeness out of their separate trials and tribulations inside their respective parties – PPP and PNC – Trotman invited Ramjattan to join the AFC.
This did not go down well with the MCC in the AFC including Sheila Holder. Ramjattan did not fit the pattern. He was dark-skinned, Hindu and did not have much MCC paraphernalia about him.
The first sight of strain between the Ramjattan and the MCC was seen in 2011 when Ramjattan decided that the AFC’s presidential candidacy should rotate and it should go to him. Trotman and the MCC were livid. MCC personalities thought that Ramjattan should know his place.
But Ramjattan was in a different world from that of the MCC. He came out of a mass-based party – the PPP – that grounded among the working class, peasantry and the Indian petite bourgeoisie.
All Ramjattan wanted to do in the AFC was to align the AFC with the kind of political world he evolved from. So, he reached out to the peasantry and the Berbice working class and he sought money from rich Hindu and Muslim Indians. He succeeded in all his political endeavours.
The MCC in 2011 was still in no mood to have him as their presidential candidate. But there was a huge rebellion among the African rank and file and working-class Indians in the AFC.
Ramjattan’s success in clinching the 2011 presidential spot was as an outcome of class struggle. The working class in the AFC, both Africans and Indians, wanted Ramjattan. The Indian petite bourgeoisie in the AFC carried a vicious fight to the MCC manifested in a poisonous confrontation between Trotman and diaspora financier, Dr Somar.
The AFC became a different party after Ramjattan became the 2011 candidate. It lost its MCC visage and became more like a mass-based party.
The AFC was inundated with Indians that Ramjattan recruited. The AFC had 10 regional branches and all of them were fitted out with people who were not from the MCC. By this time, Ramjattan had persuaded Moses Nagamootoo to join him in the AFC
It was from this period that a creeping dislike for Ramjattan by the MCC emerged. It reached its climax with the results of the 2011 general elections. Even though the election resulted in a PPP minority government, MCC personalities argued that in the 2011 national elections, the AFC spent 80 million dollars more than in the 2006 general elections and just won one seat more.
They argued that if Trotman was at the helm more middle-class people would have come out to vote. But the GECOM database contradicted that perception. Nagamootoo had made the difference. What the MCC was grumbling about was loss of identity. The AFC was looking more like a multi-racial, mass-based party with two Indians at the helm – Nagamootoo and Ramjattan.
The MCC would have none of it. The selection of MPS from the AFC caused a huge split between Trotman and Ramjattan. The MCC revolted against a Ramjattan choice of a dark-skinned, Indian woman – Gomattie Singh. Even though she was a lawyer, she was seen contemptuously by the MCC as not fit to be an AFC parliamentarian. Raphael Trotman appointed an MCC personality – his friend, Chantelle Smith.
David Granger made an astute move. Sensing that the MCC was losing out in the AFC, he rejected Nagamootoo as Speaker of the House in preference for Trotman. Class struggle was intensifying in the AFC. Part two is coming up.
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.
