The end of race voting?

The success of WIN, whose leader Azruddin Mohamed is of Indian origin, in securing votes from a solid block of votes from African and Amerindian Guyanese, in addition to a lesser number of Indian-Guyanese, has raised the question of whether we have reached the promised land of non-racial voting. To answer this question we have to ask why our citizens voted racially in the first place. There was the inaugural economic competition engendered between newly freed Africans and indentured Indians that morphed into political competition when the latter’s burgeoning numbers combined with their immigrant-fuelled economic drive were seen as a threat to Africans. By the 1920s, the several racial groups identified leaders from within their communities to represent their interests to get them “what, when and how”. One of the “whats” being which group ruled, giving the psychic the non-economic gratification of being identified with the rulers. Our political leaders benefited from but did not create the racial identities.
Both Jagan and Burnham attempted to convince their supporters to identify with their class/economic interests that transcended racial boundaries but were by and large unsuccessful. In a democratic polity, the size of the racial group advantages those with larger numbers, and our politics developed a bi-communal bent with Indian and African-Guyanese dominating. It was rational for the leader to mobilise along racial lines since the people already saw themselves with “shared fates” based on that identity marker. This assured a base. The communist Jagan justified going along with those tendencies by citing his non-racial goals. Socialist Burnham justified rigging elections to exclude Indian representation on the grounds that his decision was “political, not racial”. Amerindians sequestered in the interior were courted by all parties who replicated the historical Dutch modus operandi of offering material benefits.
The question is whether we transcended this mindset in the just-completed elections. The PPP had strained mightily since it returned to office in 1992 to foster development equitably through equal opportunities in the nascent free-market economy bequeathed by Desmond Hoyte. Objectively, African Guyanese did comparatively better economically than Indian Guyanese between 1992 and 1999, based on surveys conducted by the World Bank and the UNDP, respectively. But because of entrenched mindsets, this was unacknowledged in the PNC claims of discrimination and “ethnic cleansing” of African Guyanese. Widespread violence against Indian Guyanese followed as Amerindians remained peripheralised and racial voting hardened.
However, with comparatively higher rates of emigration whittling down the PPP’s numerical advantage, their ideological idealism for ethnic equity driving their policies towards greater inclusion of African and Amerindian Guyanese was now augmented by political realism. Oil revenues from 2020 gave them the wherewithal to be more directed in their multi-ethnic developmental drive. Their jettisoning of Marxism from their constitution allowed them to be more open in their articulation of this principle. But based on the small cross-ethnic votes garnered on September 1, they have a ways to go.
But their frontal attack on the premises of the old politics ironically helped WIN. By deconstructing the PNC’s legitimacy to represent African Guyanese interests, it became easier for one segment of disaffected PNC supporters to stay at home and another to cast a protest vote for WIN. While Indian-led, WIN did not have the PPP’s historical baggage and had been backhandedly conferred legitimacy by the latter’s trenchant criticism. WIN’s populist strategy to define both the PPP and PNC as “elites” that had to be removed by the “ignored people” resonated especially with the alienated scrapeheads of the African-Guyanese community. WIN’s massive campaign spending, which probably exceeded that of the incumbent PPP/C and allegedly included payoffs for votes, attracted both scrapeheads and Amerindians.
Scrapeheads are not interested in policies and programmes but are consumed by the promises of immediate enjoyment of the good life promised by WIN and exemplified by its leader. If unrequited, they will either return to a more sympathetic, non-Afro-Saxon PNC or erupt in nihilistic anti-social behaviour against the PPP/C government, which they have been assured is blocking their aspirations. For that government and their equal-opportunity approach to development in a free enterprise society, dealing with structural factors such as cultural differences in work ethic will pose challenges since equality of opportunity does not ineluctably lead to equality of results. But they will be blamed for that condition that involves, for instance, lifestyle choices. The anthropologist Brackette Williams found that African Guyanese stereotypically believed, “Indian-Guyanese live to work while African-Guyanese work to live.”