GENESIS OF PPP RACISM

Dear Editor,
Some years ago when I wrote that the PPP had deliberately kept its supporters at the mental and psychological level of coolies, the PPP triumphalists/apologists such as Vishnu Bisram, Anand Budhram, and others took great umbrage at my observations.
That the regime, led de facto by Bharrat Jagdeo, had to resort to naked racism after 23 years in continuous power, came as no surprise to me because the genesis of racism started with Dr Cheddi Jagan in the mid 1940’s.
Dr Jagan returned to British Guiana (BG) when the British East Indian Association (BGEIA) was in the forefront in the struggle for social and economic development of all Guyanese, particularly Indo Guyanese. Universal suffrage was inevitable and it would allow the bulk of the largely illiterate and politically ignorant rural Indo Guyanese to vote for the first time.
Dr Jagan learned that the rural Indo Guyanese would determine the election results due to their vast numbers. Who won the rural votes would win political power. Dr Jagan and his wife,  Janet, saw their opportunity to attain their communist agenda in BG.
Dr Jagan had made no headway in his bid to bamboozle the educated Indians in the BGEIA with his communist diatribe and so he broke away from the BGEIA and formed the Political Affairs Committte (PAC) in 1947 and later the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) in 1950. In the latter 1940’s Dr Jagan and his communist cadres concentrated wholly on the potential rural voters using even violence to prevent educated Indians access to them.
In the 1953 elections the PPP, with Dr Jagan and Forbes Burnham at the helm, won 18 out of 24 seats with just 38% of the votes. Dr Jagan had won the rural vote and Burnham the urban working poor votes. The election results concretised the Jagans’ minds about the vital importance of the rural votes especially after the split of the PPP in 1955.
In the elections of 1957 and 1961 the PPP managed to win solely with the rural votes due to the first past the post electoral system. That changed in 1964 with the introduction of proportional representation that saw PPP unable to win a majority. The racial violence of the 1960’s helped the PPP to cement its hold on Indians as its vote bank which can only be accessed by racial fear mongering which in turn is only possible by keeping Indians in a state of political backwardness unable to think for themselves but rather just instinctively responding to certain words such as PNC, Burnham, and coolie.
That was attained over the years by constant propagandisation at the bottom houses so much so that such propagandisation and mental conditioning became ensconced in the cultural psychology of many Indians which even university education could not remove from their minds.
But the rampant corruption, thievery, debauchery, and power drunkenness in the PPP’s 23 year reign have become so overwhelming that the 65 year old PPP hold on Indians has begun to loosen. And the current PPP leaders can respond as they were socialized in the PPP: bare faced racism.
Compounding the PPP’s failures was the fact the the Jagans never tolerated independent thinkers in the PPP and soon filled the leadership level with individuals whose only intellectual abilities were to parrot communist phrases and to say to “Yes Comrade Cheddi..Yes Comrade Janet.”
Cheddi and Janet have been long gone but their successors are still mentally imprisoned in the 1940’s and 1960’s. It is high time that Indo Guyanese leave them in the time warp and come May 11th 2015 go out and vote them out.
 Malcolm Harripaul