Below is an excerpt from an article written by Gaiutra Bahadur, author of the book Coolie Woman, and graduate of Yale and Columbia Universities.
"What unfolded shortly before polls closed on May 11 in Sophia, a mostly black community on the outskirts of Georgetown, also turned on the specter of ballot boxes. The trouble started when a minibus driver claimed that votes had been illegally cast at Narine Khublall’s home, which served as both the Indo-Guyanese pastor’s church and the PPP’s local election headquarters. After a pre-dawn prayer there, the party’s poll workers had fanned out to the area’s 30 voting stations. Food for these workers was delivered to Khublall’s house throughout the day in blue Rubbermaid plastic containers that the driver allegedly mistook for ballot boxes. As that rumor spread, an outraged knot of people formed outside.
Joseph Hamilton, the PPP parliamentarian running the headquarters, emerged to speak to the driver, an ex-policeman he knew personally. He tried to reassure residents that nothing was amiss, but the crowd only grew more irate. Hamilton’s failure to quell concerns was likely due in part to his reputation as a lightning rod; he is a man viewed alternatively as a turncoat or thug. A recent PPP convert, he had served Burnham’s party twice in parliament. Before that, he belonged to the House of Israel, a messianic, black pride church started in Guyana in the 1970s by American David Hill, a fugitive from extortion charges. House of Israel members used batons, fists, and dirty tricks to sabotage opposition political meetings for Burnham. Hamilton later helped organize PNC street demonstrations against the election of Jagan’s American-born widow, Janet, to succeed her husband after he died of heart disease in 1997. Six months of unrest followed, punctuated by bombings at a landmark hotel and TV station.
To check out the claims of illegal polling in Sophia, a team of opposition politicians swiftly descended on the town. The fusillade that followed was an assault on fact, making it difficult to decipher what precisely happened that night.
According to media reports and interviews, the team found no ballot boxes and begged the crowd to disperse. Many people, unmollified, continued to mill around the pastor’s house as night fell. At some point, they began pelting it with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails. Over the course of the night, they would set fire to at least eight vehicles, reducing them to charred metal carcasses evocative of a war zone.
When iNews Guyana reporter Jomo Paul arrived, around 8:30 p.m., he found himself stranded between police with riot shields and a mob with petrol bombs. Over the next three hours, Paul told me, he witnessed people from outside Sophia fuel the mayhem. He heard one bay, “Bring he coolie ***** out, let we chop off he head,” referring to Khublall. The racial epithet — coolie was once shorthand for indentured laborer, a slur used against Indians — and the threat of violence horrified him. Paul said he looked at the man with disgust. The man shot back, “You want me chop off you’ head too?”
“The people wanted blood,” Paul said a few days later. “I don’t know what happened in Sophia that night.” He grew up there. The population is 15 percent Indian, and there have never been ethnic clashes, he claimed. This wasn’t the Sophia he knew.
The community started as a squatters’ settlement, abandoned cane fields reclaimed by single mothers, tenants from Georgetown’s impoverished core, in the early 1990s. Jagan, by then back in power, allowed the squatters to claim legal title to the land, but residents say that in the two decades since, the PPP has ignored their needs — for sports fields, safety from crime, and basic services. What roads are paved are riddled with potholes, and for many residents, drinking water comes from standpipes on street corners. Sophia, now home to 35,000 people, is crisscrossed by garbage-clogged trenches, broken water mains, and exposed electrical wires.
Khublall, who has lived amid this neglect for 18 years, is by his account doing God’s work. “These people,” he told me, speaking of the rioters, “have proved their ungratefulness.” But another role he has played in Sophia may have proven more fateful than any Bible study or charity he offered. In 2009, Khublall established a PPP-funded community policing unit. With this came a stipend, vehicle, and a gun license. Social worker Colin Marks, who runs Sophia’s community center, says the pastor’s aggressive approach alienated him from the neighborhood’s young men. As a rural constable, Khublall focused more on dramatic arrests than on crime prevention and foot patrols. Bridges connecting Sophia’s fields had attracted vendors, and youth perched on the railings. Seeing this as a hub for drugs and criminals, Khublall proposed topping the railings with barbed wire and destroying specific stalls. “They [the mischief-makers] would be in those stands hiding and planning what to do to people at night,” Khublall said. On top of his campaigning for the PPP in the national election, the pastor’s sheriff persona had tarred him as a representative of state power — at a time when many black men saw the government as hostile.
On election night, Marks says, he saw this festering resentment in the community explode. “With more people coming [to the house that night], they get the sense that they’re empowered now,” he told me. “[He] got the vehicle; he got the backings of the police; he got the backings of the party; he got the backing of the gun, but Khublall doesn’t have [the power] now.”
* * *
The perception of the PPP-run state as discriminatory extends well past its support of people like Khublall and its failure to deliver infrastructure to places like Sophia. History might well be repeating itself, but with ironic role reversal. Critics contend that the PPP, once an underdog, has perpetuated the state repression and disturbing settling of ethnic scores rampant under Burnham.
In 2002, five escapees from a Georgetown jail embarked on a spree of murders, kidnappings, and robberies. They styled themselves as guerrilla fighters in an Afro-Guyanese resistance to the Indian-dominated government believed to have been hoarding opportunities for its own. Other gangs joined; perhaps the most notorious, led by Rondell “Fineman” Rawlins, was judged responsible for three devastating massacres. When law enforcement couldn’t cope, a shadowy paramilitary unit, known as the Phantom Squad, emerged. Run by an Indo-Guyanese cocaine trafficker named Shaheed “Roger” Khan, once linked to two PPP ministers, the Phantom Squad conducted extrajudicial killings, mainly of black criminals who had targeted Indo-Guyanese.
The crime wave and the retributions against it lasted for six dark years. (Khan is now in prison in California.) Its influence is still deeply felt, including in Sophia, which served as the hide-out or home to two members of Fineman’s gang.
On election night, local police watched as Hamilton’s SUV and other vehicles were burned. And they watched as Khublall’s neighbor became a target too. An active PPP supporter, she is a businesswoman accused of using racial epithets against her black employees, a charge she denies. Her bed, flat-screen television, and refrigerator were looted — rioters distributed Guinness from the fridge — and her horse stable and the shack where her grooms lived were torched; her employees, husband, and horses were beaten.
The violence did not stop until an army detachment arrived, to the trust and clapping of the crowd, shortly before midnight. Soon after, police led 30 people from the election headquarters, including Khublall and Hamilton, in plastic handcuffs. The arrests appear to have been staged to save them.
After hiding with relatives in the rice-growing countryside for a month, during which he considered fleeing Guyana, Khublall returned home. His congregation has diminished, and an uneasy truce exists between him and the neighborhood. While the pastor doesn’t dispute the critical characterization of his policing style, he says that the outburst on election night wasn’t about that. It wasn’t even about politics, he argues. His neighbors “used this [election] period here to get into our homes to kill us and rob us,” he charges. “This Sophia community is predominantly a thieving area.”
Hamilton, meanwhile, alleges it was a premeditated attempt by “opposition elements” to interfere as polls closed: “What transpired that evening wasn’t spontaneous,” he told me. “It was orchestrated and planned. You don’t have a spontaneous protest, and people already have Molotov cocktails.… I deh round dis business a long time. Take it for granted when I speak to you about these matters.”
Part Two - A few days later
"In a country house close to Jagan’s birthplace, 42-year old Rajmattie Arjune told me, “Our president ask for a recount, and they don’t want give we.” Her friend, who attended several PPP protests alleging rigging, spoke to me about the election night incident in Sophia as an anti-Indian attack. And she remembered the food shortages and stolen votes during Burnham’s regime. “I’m telling you about the hardship that we went through under the PNC government,” 63-year-old Baso Sukhdeo said. “That’s what everybody’s saying, that there’s a possibility it will happen again.”
History has warned Sukhdeo, like so many Guyanese, to be wary of other people’s facts. She is guided only by her belief in the PPP, its leaders, and their narrative. Her faith, unshaken by newspaper headlines, international observers’ reports, or any other material claiming to pronounce truth, is a reality all its righteous own.
“There are two things I won’t change in my life: my religion and my party,” the old woman told me. Then, employing a Hindu metaphor for destiny, she added, “What is written on the forehead is written. That’s just my belief.”
