Dear Editor,
Sometimes I truly wonder why people write letters to the editor. I say this because, only days ago, I read and re-read Vishnu Bisram’s “Doctrine needs explanation”, but could find no socially useful purpose to the lengthy diatribe. I do not want to get into a personal spat here, but I frankly must respond to multiple elementary errors contained in the said letter.
Allow me to recap what I argued in the original article, “The Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023”, which is the subject of responses from Bisram, and before that Andre Brandli. I wrote that, on two occasions in 2023, the General Secretary of the PPP publicly declared that the party would fight all attempts to divide Guyana along racial lines. I specifically noted General Secretary Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo had publicly acknowledged that the PPP had not done enough in the past to reach out to Afro-Guyanese, and that this must, and will, change. I labelled the declarations “The Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023” (Demerara Waves, 12/31/2023).
Knowing fully and well that the concept of doctrine might not be familiar to the general public, I wrote the following – “A doctrine is a coherent set of ideas, principles, norms, and expectations that frames the ways in which (in this case) a political party thinks about things, about its fundamental values and commitments, and about its core objectives, about its conduct, both public and private.”
I took full cognizance of the progressive history of the PPP, and noted “[t]he older PPP had powerful ideological commitments, most of it anchored in anti-colonialism and economic egalitarianism. The latter often took the language of socialism.”
Given the above, I do not know why an explanation is needed; or, worse yet, what must be explained. One argument by Bisram is that ‘doctrine’ is reserved for foreign affairs. This is a vacuous claim. There are legal doctrines (caveat emptor); constitutional doctrines (separation of powers, developed by Montesquieu and embedded in the US and other constitutions); philosophical doctrines (doctrine of necessity); military doctrines (nuclear deterrence and counterinsurgency doctrine); and, inter alia, the Public Trust doctrine, which has been around since 1299, is also widely used in the structuration of global environmental governance.
A strange, or more accurately a neo-colonial, idea in the letter under consideration is that the Global South (I prefer Third World) has never produced a doctrine! If Dr. Bisram were abreast with the literature in international relations, he would know that postcolonial scholars have long ago destroyed that idea. On that score, I recommend the work of my colleague, Professor Amitav Acharya.
Please note that the New International Economic Order was not developed by Jagan. The NIEO came out of the Non-Aligned Movement. It was first articulated in 1973. Cheddi Jagan’s work is the New Global Human Order (1994).
Sincerely,
Dr Randy Persaud
