Submitted by Rickford Burke
Bisram’s diatribe amplifies the PPP’s tactics to block an Afro-Guyanese from being elected President
Vishnu Bisram, a Queens based pseudo pollster, in a letter published in the Guyana Times on March 1, 2015, alleged that I’m a racist because I established that his party – the PPP, traditionally practices racism against Afro-Guyanese but pretends to love us at election time. If he thinks that condemning the PPP’s oppression of black people in Guyana makes me a racist, then so be it. I wear that label as a badge of honor.
Bisram said my assertion that when President Cheddie Jagan died, Prime Minister Sam Hinds, an Afro-Guyanese, was eviscerated to allow a none-black to take over the presidency, is a fabrication. He also claimed that Mrs. Harper’s selection as the PPP’s prime ministerial candidate demonstrates the PPP’s “multiracial politics.”
Let’s examine the facts and quickly dispatch Bisram so that he may slither back into his cave. Associating the PPP with “multi-racial” politics is ostentatious but diabolically devious. The PPP’s ethnic cleansing, racism, extrajudicial killings of over 400 black men and instigation of the race wars of the 1960s disprove this fallacy. But the nation has advanced. Unity with a new thinking and a post-racial era is dawning.
It is a fact that the PPP intransigently jettisoned Prime Minister Sam Hinds from the presidency, not once but twice. First, indeed when President Cheddie Jagan died in February 1997, Hinds became President in accordance with the Constitution. His tenure was brief. He was forced to appoint the American-born, Caucasian wife of President Jagan, Mrs. Janet Jagan, as Prime Minister even though she was not in the Cabinet. Janet Jagan became the PPP’s presidential candidate for the December 1997 election. She was declared elected and installed her as President. The Court later nullified that election.
Second, in August 1999 when Mrs. Jagan announced an intent to resign from the presidency, “everlasting” Prime Minister Hinds was forced to resign before she demitted office to allow her to appoint then Finance Minister Bharrat Jagdeo as Prime Minister. When she resigned, Jagdeo automatically become President and reappointed Hinds as Prime Minister.
These ruthless tactics ensured that an Afro-Guyanese, although second in command, was never elected President under the PPP. If the PPP genuinely believes in diversity, why pursue such machiavellian shenanigans to depose an Afro-Guyanese? This is indefensible and I’m delighted that Bisram is making it an issue in the election campaign. He is so congenitally enslaved to the evil allure of race-baiting that he fails to realize that instilling misplaced fear of blacks in Indians to galvanize votes is now obsolete, washed-out and futile.
Bisram’s claim that the PNC government of 22 years ago did not have many Indians or an Indian prime ministerial candidate is not only mendacious. It represents the primordial politics of the 1960s which we condemned to the dustbins of history eons ago, and exposes him as an irrelevant, antediluvian creature. He just doesn’t get it. The era of racially divisive politic is over. Bisram has no clue what he’s talking about. Not only was President’s Hoyte’s administration the most diverse in history, but Winston Murray, an Indian, was once the PNC’s prime ministerial candidate.
This new generation of Guyanese wants a prosperous, inclusive, harmonious, multiracial society. We want to develop our country together. We want a nation where all human rights and freedoms are cherished and respected, and where there is equal justice under law. The Bisram types are nullifidians of an equal and harmonious society, who must be vanquished.
It is a little audacious of Bisram to accuse me of “making up stuff” about the PPP, when he is notorious for publishing fake, ethnic polls on elections in Guyana and Trinidad. His polls have been so reprehensibly ethnic driven, that the Organization of American States (OAS), in 2009, warned Caribbean nations that he was “not credible,” and ran him out of town.
It’s elections in Guyana, and Bisram is desperate to be relevant. In dismissing him I say; run along into the dustbin of history!
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