Guyana’s tragedy

The GECOM decision has once again raised political temperatures in Guyana. The Mahabharat is rather unique among Hindu texts in dealing very extensively with the world of politics and, as I wrote a decade ago, I am once again struck by parallels in that ancient conflict and ours in Guyana. The Mahabharata is about the way we humans deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are to each other in our day-to-day lives. And all the while holding fast to the belief that our position is “just” and that of others, “unjust”.
But there are no “pure” heroes in the Mahabharata: unlike what is conventionally depicted, the conflict between the two sides is not a battle between “right and wrong”, much less between “good and evil”. The Pandavas, the nominal “good guys”, are not perfect, and several who fight for the Kauravas, the “bad guys” are truly noble. The potential for “good” or “bad” lies in every human being.
In Guyana, our history has conspired to create a tragic situation. Not “tragic” in the sense of terrible things happening – even though we’ve had more that our fair share of those – but in the way that Hegel interpreted Greek tragedy. His famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. He shows in that narrative, both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim.
The “sides” I refer to in our country are, of course, the descendants of the Africans who were brought as slaves and those of Indians brought as indentured servants – both to labour on the sugar plantations. Those African slaves were dragged against their wills across the Atlantic to work as chattel, under conditions of mind-numbing cruelty. “Emancipation” had to be bitter pill to swallow when Indentured labourers (Portuguese, freed West Indians, Africans, Indians and Chinese) were brought in as “scabs” to undercut their demand for higher living wages. It was only to be the beginning of many manoeuvres to deny justice to Africans; but it set the tone of what was to follow.
The indentureds, dominated by Indians, countered that they were unwitting pawns in the British game of “divide and rule”. They could, and did, point to the increasingly meagre wages they were forced to work for under pressures by new fellow Indian immigrants on the plantations in the subsequent century. Their demonstrated capacity to produce “two blades of grass where there was but one” under the severest pressures, however, formed the basis of their moral claim to justice and equality.
As in the Mahabharat, both sides were promised that if they played by the rules, the “kingdom” would eventually be theirs. While we may rail against the Kaurava Durjodhan (and Burnham) for their overweening ambition, no one can deny that they were leaders of groups who had legitimate moral claims to power. Similarly, the gambling away of the Pandava’s inheritance by Yudhishthira (at dice) and Jagan (with Kennedy and Duncan Sandys) cannot be glossed over, but does not vitiate the similar moral claims of their supporters.
That the two groups coexisted without major conflicts until the sixties was not coincidental. It was the majoritarian system of choosing who would “inherit” the kingdom in 1957 – as was the Emperor-making ceremony in the Mahabharat – that precipitated the internecine warfare that continues to the present. It was not surprising that the manipulator (the US/British here, Duryodhan’s uncle in Mahabharat) would inveigle one side to try to grab the entire pie. The “rules”, after all, made an exclusive claim to rule by each group “right”.
But we must concede that those rules do not necessarily make this exclusivity moral. If we accept that, as citizens of this land we are all equal, we must arrange the rules of selecting the rulers in such a manner so that both sides (and indeed all “sides”) feel involved in governance. Our common history of suffering, if nothing else, demands this outcome for the sake of morality. Before any future elections all parties should commit themselves to such an arrangement through constitutional change. The opposite, I fear, is the war of the Mahabharat, which let us not forget, destroyed almost all sides – including the group backed by God himself.
War, we are taught, has no winners.