Guyana Observer News

The East Indians of Guyana: The inheritance of dictatorship

Tuesday, 05 May 2009

The subject of philosophy makes for dreary and difficult reading. It took me three endeavours to understand Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” I persisted with this difficult philosophy text and it turned out to be, for me, the best philosophy book that was ever authored and one of the books that have influenced my approach to life.
Philosophy is a great discipline though it is replete with pessimistic thoughts on the human condition. A majority of people in the world thinks it is too melancholy a subject to recommend to students.
Once mastered, philosophy makes you understand that absolutely nothing in life is beyond comprehension and that nothing in life must be thought of as being impossible to have existence. When you understand the human condition (if it could ever be understood) then the idea that human existence could be transformed into unimaginable shapes becomes easily comprehensible.
The Jews’ mistreatment of the Palestinians becomes the most obvious example when such a topic is up for debate. The last race group in the world that should brutalize another ethnic community the way Hitler’s Germany did to them is the Jewish state of Israel.
Yet in the recent invasion of the Gaza, the Jewish army behaved like the Nazi soldiers and committed war crimes against the Palestinian civilians.
A majority of the East Indians of Guyana over the past 16 years are silent over the use of state power to discriminate, humiliate and diminish the presence of another ethnic constituency in this country when those very Indians knew the feelings of racial deprivation and appealed to the world to intervene.
The world did just that as it did when the Jews cried and the world gave the Jews a country of their own.
All across the globe, sympathy came for the Guyanese Indians who begged for attention. They wanted racial discrimination to be stopped. They wanted to share Guyana. Sadly, today, the Indians aren’t sharing Guyana. Sadly today, the Jews of Israel and the East Indians of Guyana have proven philosophy right. Those who write about the human condition will continue to ask: “Which other race group will betray the world?”
I know about discrimination against the ethnic composition of which I am a member. I saw it in the seventies and eighties. I saw it with my own two eyes. I saw thousands and thousands of Indians in Guyana cry out for justice.
Their only crime was that they were Indians. I met lawyers, doctors, farmers, professionals, university students, market vendors, hire-car drivers, business people who prayed for the day when discrimination against Guyanese Indians would stop. The misery of discrimination showed its ugly face when visiting cricket teams would be supported by Indians against their own West Indian boys.
But there was one beautiful nuance in the struggle of Indians that should never escape mention. There were thousands of decent African Guyanese who joined the battle cry of the Indians. Some died so Indians could have been freed.
Today, the Jews when dealing with the Palestinians do not care to remember what the Nazis did to them. Today, in tragic Guyana, the East Indians have inherited the fruits of dictatorship.
As they devour the resources of this territory, as they celebrate Indian Arrival Day, they will garland governmental leaders and Hindu pandits who are open and frenetic racists.
I attended the TUC May Day Rally. And I felt broken hearted because the same feeling of angst that penetrated my soul in the seventies and eighties when I heard the cries of state mistreatment of Indians, I heard at that rally.
This time the victims were Africans. Yesterday, the Indians didn’t belong. Their land was not theirs.
Today the Africans are internal exiles. It is their time to feel that they are being pushed out.
This is the madness of politics, the insanity of sociology and the tragedy of social life that have dominated this landscape since I was born. Nothing has changed in my lifetime. A man, a woman gets a piece of the pie in Guyana today depending on the blood that runs in his/her veins.
It is the judgement of race. It is the ultimate in human destruction.
It would be really fascinating to look inside the minds of the Guyanese Indian rulers, their supporters and those Indians who lived through the seventies and eighties as they flock to the parks, mandirs and mosques to celebrate not only Indian Arrival Day but THEIR time. There was a time when they didn’t have THEIR time.
But their leaders shamelessly tell you THEIR time has come.
With it may come, the final seeds of the destruction of this nation.

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