Cheddi Jagan: Transformational leader

On March 6th, 16 years ago, Dr Cheddi Jagan was cremated at the foreshore of Babu John, not far from the village of Port Mourant where he spent his idyllic childhood, described so vividly in his classic, “The West on Trial”. From Berbice he proceeded to Queen’s College in Georgetown and then on to the USA, where he qualified as a dentist and returned to Georgetown during WWII.
Today, there are some who answer in the negative as to whether he was a “transformational leader”. For them to answer that fairly, they would have to know Guyana in general and Georgetown in particular during those times. It was a society that was rigidly stratified along the lines of class and colour that amounted to a virtual caste system. You were born in a stratum and you were supposed to remain there until you died.
Jagan was the leader who first saw beyond that limiting horizon established by the colonial masters – but which was accepted by almost all the leaders who preceded him. Those leaders lived in a world where the franchise was restricted by “qualifications” of language, income and property which excluded vast numbers of Guyanese of the ‘lower classes’. The politicians were drawn from the middle class and addressed the problems of that class within the lines drawn by the expatriate ruling class and their local allies. They saw no need generally to move out of their comfortable cocoon.
The only way to move up and out of one’s stratum if born poor, was through education, which could earn a passage into the middle class. As a dentist, Jagan was expected to follow the other professionals and enjoy the ‘perks’ of the middle class. But this is where Jagan refused to conform and became the paradigmatic ‘transformational’ leader.
Contrary to what his detractors did, he did in fact try to work within the existing middle class organisations – in his case the British Guiana East Indian Association. But he soon realised that they were limited by the constricted horizon. He soon left them and formed a discussion group – Political Action Committee, (PAC) – which attracted many young urban intellectuals who were also dissatisfied with the status quo. The ideas, he introduced, influenced by a Marxist analysis of the society, went far beyond the ethnic organisations that were part and parcel of the divide and rule policy of the colonial power.
His election to the Legislature in 1947 afforded him a wider platform for expression of his radical view that tinkering and reform of the system would never suffice to bring justice to Guyana as a whole. But it was his work outside of the ‘official’ controlled channels that he finally made his greatest transformation of the Guyanese political landscape that delivered Guyana into the modern age.
He realised, far ahead of his ‘senior’ political colleagues in the legislature, that universal franchise was coming and more importantly how to organise for it. He realised that the sugar workers, out of which he had been born, formed the largest potential bloc of future voters – but they had been neglected by his predecessors. The latter were also unfamiliar with that constituency and with the new techniques of mass mobilisation that would be necessary to bring them into the emerging political system.
He worked with others to form a more vibrant sugar union to represent the interests of sugar workers and by 1948 when circumstances in the sugar belt demanded radical leadership, Dr Cheddi Jagan was there to provide it. In one stroke he was catapulted to head a movement that led to the formation of a mass political party within two years – the People’s Progressive Party. And this was the party that swept the first elections in Guyana held under universal franchise in 1953.
Events since then are mere footnotes to the life of the great transformational leader Dr Cheddi Jagan.