Dear Editor,
I applaud former President Donald Ramotar and others in the PPP hierarchy for exposing racial discrimination being experienced by Indians and Amerindians ever since the coalition APNU/AFC was installed in office last May.
Ramotar must be commended for courageously penning several articles in recent months exposing the coalition’s racist policies targeting Indians and Amerindians and even some Africans and Mixed who supported the PPP.
However, critics inform me this position is in sharp contrast to when PPP/C was in office and Indians were targets of violent racist attacks and robberies from the other side. I received emails pointing out that Ramotar and others in the PPP hierarchy were largely silent when Indians were victims of attacks during its rule and worse, they attacked those who came to the defence of Indians.
During elections held between 1992 and 2015, and at countless opposition marches in between those years, Indians were targeted for physical attacks and robberies; many females were sexually molested. Indians were victims of racism.
The PPP downplayed the racist attacks on its own supporters and did not take effective measures to protect and defend them. Indian victims did not get justice for the brutality they experienced – financial compensation for arson at their homes and businesses and for racially motivated robberies.
It was ROAR and Indian rights activists who called for an end to the racist attacks on Indians. They stood up for and defended the Indians against the attackers and demanded protection from the PPP government and now from the APNU/AFC government.
I received an email from a fan, “calling out PPP leadership as hypocrites playing a game writing letters about racism against Indians now to show that the PPP cares for Indians”. He feels Indians are only used for their votes and then dumped aside after the election.
Another email rebukes Ramotar for only now taking up the issue of racism against Indians at a time when he is in no position to do anything for Indians: “He should have exposed anti-Indian and anti-Amerindian racism many years ago and took measures to end racism and protect them when he was President. There is no point in crying now” when PPP can’t protect Indians.
Another email pointed out that, “Indians were abused when PPP was in and out of government. PPP never had real power. And when it had power, it did not know how to use it like how PNC and David Granger use power”.
My own position is it is never too late to expose racism regardless of who are the victims. Clearly, going by reports in the media and my personal experience traveling around Guyana, Indians and Amerindians have been victims since the change in government.
A ROAR organizer sent me an email in which he claimed that Ramotar, during a PPP visit to Winnipeg, Canada around 2001 simply walked up to him and called him a racist without any prior discussion. The PPP group included Ramotar, Goffrey DaSilva, the Toronto Consul General, and a couple others.
Just to put the issue in perspective, I was informed that “ROAR Winnipeg” was a small group that was committed to the primary objective (racial equity and not racial dominance) of ROAR in Guyana and the group supported ROAR.
To put the issue in context, prior to the PPP Winnipeg visit, Ravi Dev was invited, as an Indian Rights Activist, for a three-day visit to Winnipeg to meet Guyanese and discuss the social and political events in Guyana. It was noted that “Ravi had not as yet announced ROAR as a political party that would contest elections. This would come after the murder of an Indian business woman in New Amsterdam. Indian business persons were being robbed and killed at will during PPP governance and the party was not mounting an effective response. ROAR sympathizers told me they felt the PPP was doing virtually nothing to end the racist terror unleashed against Indians and urged Ravi to address the issue and internationalise the predicament facing Indians. Ravi took the issue head-on; he spoke out against the attacks on Indians thereby forcing the PPP to condemn the abuses and human rights violations meted out to Indians”.
A ROAR supporter also informed me a PPP supporter did the same in Toronto at a Ravi Dev meeting. The source told me: “Speaking to a large crowd of ROAR supporters sometime around 2002, Ravi’s speech was disrupted by an Indo-Guyanese woman who asked a rather unintelligible question and as Ravi tried to respond, she started screaming that he is a racist. This created quite a commotion”.
I was also reminded that the PPP leadership held a meeting near to Ravi’s home around 2002/3 right after ROAR was launched “engaging in a cuss him down just because Ravi spoke out against racism experienced by Indians and demanding racial equity for all groups”.
All of this is now water under the bridge since PPP has begun to recognise its fatal errors. But the history of its behaviour needs to be on the public record.
As some of my reading fans say, it is good to read PPP leadership exposing anti-Indian and antiAmerindian racism and political victimisation. Racism must be condemned regardless of who practices it. But the PPP must go further and call for justice for the victims of racism. And APNU/AFC must end the practice of firing workers based on their ethnicity and political affiliation. The country needs power sharing-among the ethnic groups.
Yours truly,
Vishnu Bisram
