Tackling racism

No one can contest the truth that during the period of Indian indentureship and its immediate aftermath, it was the policy of the colonial government to keep the Indians on the sugar plantations – more specifically, as stated by one planter in front of a Royal Commission, if not in the fields, then either in goal or in the hospital.
The colonial government turned a blind eye to the open violation of the law of the land that all children should attend school and acquiesced in their exploitation in the aptly named “creole gang” in which they were trained for the jobs thought suitable for them: hewers of wood and haulers of water. Entry into the Civil Service, seen as the apex of colonial vocational aspiration, was circumscribed because of the “old boy” referral system of the British and coloured elites and their stereotypes of the role of the “coolie”.
As late as 1935, after Cheddi Jagan graduated from Queen’s College, he could not obtain a job in the Civil Service. He recounted that his father asked the then Indian leader and member of the legislature, Dr Jang Bahadur Singh, to assist and was told that he would be better off sending the young Jagan ‘abroad’. It was this kind of discrimination against Indians in the state sector that forced them to fall back on their own resources to survive in the private sector.
It was against this background that former President Bharrat Jagdeo spoke about the rebirth of an “anti-Indian resurgence”, which he has detected in the society, at the funeral of the late Pandit Reepu Daman Persaud. Persaud would have experienced firsthand in the 1940s the still prevalent entrenched anti-Indian prejudices and discrimination in the Civil Service. We must remember that Pandit Reepu started his working career as a law clerk and had many doors closed to him as he attempted to move upwards in society as a very bright but poor Indian young man.
So those who are asserting that the occasion for ex-President Jagdeo’s observation was inappropriate should reflect on the career of the man whose perorations were sounded. It was most fitting. The substantive content of the comments, unsurprisingly, have unleashed a torrent of criticisms from the quarters that have spent the last two decades painting the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) and the government as “Indian” and “anti-African”.
Leading the charge has been the Stabroek News which has set up itself as the inheritor of the mantle of the old elite that looked at Indian accomplishment and endeavour with disdain, if not scorn. In a scathing editorial that dubbed Jagdeo’s statement “vacuous and contrived”, ironically Stabroek News ignored its own caution: “Speech related to the race problematic that has existed here (Guyana) for decades has to be well thought out, contextualised, cognisant of the antipathies that can be unnecessarily fomented and delivered in a manner that doesn’t compound the matter being complained of.”
As ex-President Jagdeo pointed out in reacting to the editorial, “Stabroek News appeared not to be concerned when the primary statement regarding racism by the PPP/C was made in the courts.”  Those charges did not need “context”. After years of lambasting Indians in general as “backward”, “fools”, “racist”, “corrupt” and of being ashamed for being a member of that race, and President Jagdeo, as being the quintessence of such defects, Freddie Kissoon had been taken to the courts by Jagdeo.
Kissoon’s accusations had been made within a racially charged atmosphere after gunmen had formed an African Freedom Movement and dedicated themselves to removing what they dubbed to be an “Indian” government and its “Indian” supporters, including children, babies, and cripples. In the court case, the lawyer Nigel Hughes brought out the list of 38 Indians that had been promoted in the now dubbed “Public Service” as evidence of the administration’s “racism”.
It has evidently not dawned upon the Stabroek News, or Hughes who is chairman of the Alliance For Change (AFC), and those others accusing the PPP/C government of “racism” that they themselves are making the racist assumptions that the named 38 Indians did not merit their appointments.
Their premise is that, once an Indian Guyanese is appointed or promoted, then it is automatically a matter of “favouritism” or “cronyism”. This is what prompted Jagdeo’s ironic comment that the message to Indian parents is that they should not bother to educate their children.
Every Guyanese ought to have equal opportunity, and everyone should be treated with dignity and not be judged because of their ethnicity.
Let us discuss the issue fairly and dispassionately.