Rupert Roopnarine and the Indo-Guyanese question

In David Hinds’ blog, Politics 101, reflecting on Rupert Roopnarine’s “political struggles”, he claims that on the latter’s return to Guyana in 1976 (not 1977 as claimed), it “was widely expected that he would formally join the PPP. Instead, he joined the WPA, the multiracial political movement. He was seen as this new Indian Messiah, creating a love-hate between Roopnarine and the party’s leadership.” He then jumps a decade and a half to claim “competition intensified when figures associated with activist Ravi Dev accused Roopnarine and other Indo-Guyanese members of the WPA of not being Indian enough…”
I would like to take this opportunity to clarify the claims as they refer to the groups to which I was affiliated – the Jaguar Committee for Democracy (JCD) and later, ROAR. We were active in the US tri-state area from the early 1980s, highlighting the excesses of the PNC dictatorship and lobbying for free and fair elections. The PPP had their own group, the Association of Concerned Guyanese (ACG), that saw us as “right wing” and were hostile. We were au fait with the works of Dr Walter Rodney and had followed the activities of the WPA, which trumpeted its “multiracial” credentials after being launched in 1974. We invited Mr Eusi Kwayana to address us on the political situation in Guyana sometime in 1984 in the Richmond Hill/Jamaica area, where the Indo-Guyanese were concentrated. Afro-Guyanese were concentrated in Brooklyn, where I had attended Brooklyn College and had heard Dr Rodney speak at a meeting of the Caribbean Club during the late 1970s.
We had rejected the PPP’s position under Dr Jagan that race/ethnicity in Guyanese politics was an “epiphenomenon” that should be ignored in favour of class and felt that the WPA’s position was more realistic. On my return to Guyana in 1989, I frequently visited the WPA’s office on Brickdam and engaged its leadership in discussions. My sole financial political contribution ever was to the WPA. My most frequent interlocutors were Mr Eusi Kwayana and Rupert Roopnarine. While Mr Kwayana freely referred to his identification with his African roots, at no time did Rupert ever claim to be “Indian”.
As a matter of fact, he stressed his Creole-centric early years in Kitty/Georgetown in primary school under his schoolteacher parents to prepare him for the scholarship that would take him to Queens College. To emphasise this, he took time to tell me his first girlfriend was African Guyanese and later, when we spent much time together working to form a third force during 2005, that he was “more comfortable in McKenzie than in Mahaica”, where he was then living.
It was in the run-up to the 1992 elections that the question of Rupert as the “Indian co-leader in the multiracial WPA” was raised by a correspondent to the Jaguar Newsletter of the JCD. The person noted that in the 1985 elections the African co-leader Clive Thomas was the presidential candidate, and instead of Rupert getting the nod in 1992, he was “shafted”.
A hysterical full-page ad in the Stabroek News was taken out by Moses Bhagwan of the WPA, furiously attacking the JCD as “Indian tribalists”. This hysteria was intensified when a poll by Dr Ramharack in 1991 predicted the WPA would secure a minuscule four per cent of the vote, and we were accused of supporting the PPP, which was shown to be winning comfortably. The WPA actually received two per cent of the votes.
The SN allowed the debate on the ethnic identification of Rupert to be aired in its letters pages because, basically, we had identified a 1970 analysis of Walter Rodney to use as an organising principle. This proposed that since the racial divisions from the sixties were still salient, mobilisation within ethnic communities to engender cultural pride and confidence should be accepted – with the caveat that the “ethnic” leaders would then forge cross-ethnic linkages. Our surveys had shown those ethnic divisions persisting into the 1990s and, as such, proposed that the ethnic leaders in asserted “multiracial” parties like the WPA should, as such, not only be phenotypically (physically) Indian or African or Amerindian but also culturally so. To their credit, Rupert Roopnarine never claimed to be Indian in this sense.
Sadly, in one of the WPA defences, Mr Kwayana claimed that since Rupert had made a film on the Cove and John Ashram, he satisfied the criterion of being culturally Indian. That, of course, was tantamount to asserting that Francis Ford Coppola was a Mafia Godfather.