ROAR's membership is open to all ethnic groups - Dev
There are cultural differences but there must be compromises in the national interest
Current Affairs July 2004
Stabroek News
July 21, 2004
The ROAR party has been the butt of PPP propaganda for participating in the activities of the People's Movement for Justice, one of whose members is the PNCR. But ROAR's leader Ravi Dev, told Current Affairs he is using the propaganda as part of its education programme for its members about the virtue of speaking frankly with members of the Afro-Guyanese community about their fears and aspirations.
Dev in an interview with Current Affairs said that his party's leadership has had to spend an inordinate amount of time countering the PPP propaganda but we are using it as part of our education exercise to show that on the one hand the party cannot be called racist as some like to label us yet at the same time working very diligently to join with the other parties. "So we are using it to clear up some of these contradictions inherent in that kind of propaganda. So from that standpoint a lot of the work is just to counter it. We put a positive approach to it. At least it opens up people's eyes"
Other work ROAR has been doing and intends to do over the next two years, Dev says, would be to appeal directly to people at the grass roots level that "we should not see ourselves as enemies".
"We might oppose each other in certain areas in what we feel is the national good but we will have to work out some compromises in those areas but we are not enemies in terms that we should fight (each other)."
He said too that ROAR had made some headway in demonstrating to Indians what it considers to be an important factor that causes conflict between Indians and Africans. "It is a cultural problem. Indians are socialised not to embarrass the other person because in their culture they are not supposed to embarrass others. There is this whole notion of shame. You are not supposed to cause shame. So Indians typically, will not confront, will not tell someone to their face that they disagree with them. They would not say anything so the other party believes that this individual agrees with him and the Indian goes around and acts to show that they did not agree and it is seen as a betrayal."
A ROAR picket outside Freedom House
On the other hand, Dev says that African Guyanese have been socialised to speak their mind, to tell their truth very frontally. "To ROAR we have seen these different orientations to communications have led to a lot of misunderstandings. So we want to demonstrate to Indians that you could speak your truth directly to African Guyanese who may differ with you but our experiences have shown that they will listen to you. In fact they respect you and you may have the opportunity to change their minds and they may have the opportunity to change your mind."
He said that in a sense in a living way ROAR is trying to change the political culture away from gamesmanship but in a deeper cultural sense from the orientation of not confronting people when they disagree with them. "It is a big aspect of what we would be doing."
Asked how ROAR is faring Dev said that the party realised after the 2001 elections that "people will not be swayed by sentiment. You have to have a very good party structure in place to be able to engage your supporters. Keep them posted on all the rumours and all the other propaganda that fly about out there."
As a consequence he says that ROAR's leadership has been focusing on building party groups across the country. "We have a very focused approach where from the very beginning we never thought of winning the elections by ourselves. But strategically we are looking to win 3 - 5 seats."
He said that ROAR is building its groups in all the Indian areas and that it has so far 42 groups. The party also has a newsletter that it publishes monthly, holds monthly seminars and it has a television programme that keeps the party supporters updated and the party has full-time organisers in Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice that work every single day to keep the party groups.
About raising funds for the party, Dev says "it is very, very tough. Basically we have just volunteers."
He explains,"In our first go-around we got a fair bit of funding from the overseas Indian Guyanese community. That has dried up completely. The community has moved on. Our people are socialized to think of politics only at election time. So between elections it is very, very difficult."
He said that there are only three businessmen in Guyana who make nominal contributions and the party holds fund-raisers - barbeques and other events at which alcohol is banned. "Our groups take care of their own expenses. We are a grass roots organisation. People donate, people give. We are not funded by anybody. This is part of what might make us stronger."
He said that he has observed that why the PPP and PNC have survived is that the people who built those organisations gave in so many ways and are therefore committed to them. "Unless the people have built the organisation they are not going to be very committed to it. So in this very strategy we are working with the ordinary people."
Dev, recalling the early days of the groups that predated the formation of ROAR as a political party, said that in the run up to the 1992 elections, The Jaguar Committee for Democracy (JCD), of which he was then a member had been in a stiff debate with the Working People's Alliance which had branded the PPP and PNC as peas in a pod. He said that the JCD had believed that this was an unfair categorization; "we felt that the PPP had to be given an opportunity (to govern) mainly in our estimation because Dr (Cheddi) Jagan had said that he would have a government of national reconciliation."
Dev said that Dr Jagan was talking about a national front government about which the JCD had written favourably in the Stabroek News. But he said that when the PPP won the 1992 elections it reneged on Dr Jagan's commitment about the national front government. "We felt it was a very, very bad strategic decision (and secondly) it did not even reach out to elements in both the WPA and PNC to be part of its government so as to give real representation to African Guyanese."
He said that the JCD felt it would have been a good move on the part of the PPP to have offered the PNC certain strategic ministries to show its sincerity. Just as important, Dev said that the JCD saw the PPP insisted on not changing any of the institutional forces that had been built up during the PNC's tenure on a basis of authoritarianism amounting almost to totalitarianism to wit the Presidency, the nature of the army and police force. "Most of the institutions were left intact and in fact I wrote an article in the Stabroek News in '93 not long after they had been elected and it became apparent that no structural changes were taking place."
The article was called "The Anatomy of Power" and Dev said that in it he articulated the nature of the power and that the PPP had to address a re-allocation of power. He said too that later that year he predicted that there would be violence here because the PPP was not addressing the structural nature of power and that African Guyanese felt marginalised and would resort to the avenues available to them which was basically force.
Dev said that having retired from the spotlight he returned to working with Indian youths in the countryside and only resurfaced politically after the January 12, 1998 riots in Georgetown, where he pointed out the PPP's refusal to deal with the nature of power assured the kind of politics that would be played out.
He said that the mobilization as a result of the January 12 event led to his involvement with GIFT (Guyana Indian Foundation Trust) and in 1999 with ROAR as a pressure group to bring the issues he had been talking about to the surface. By September 2000 ROAR became a political party and participated in the 2001 elections. "The main thing I would like to stress is that nothing in our analysis has changed since 1990.
"What I think people got caught up with is that we were addressing a specific manifestation of the contradictions which was the beating of Indians in Guyana and we did take a rather polemical stance deliberately so to bring to bear upon the Guyanese public and the politicians that you have to deal with the contradictions that here you have a concrete manifestation of the violence that is almost systemic in the society.
"We called for a commission of inquiry then that Jagan refused as President of the Republic. We called for a peace and reconciliation commission then to look backwards (and) we didn't get anywhere and unfortunately the politics of confrontation has persisted."
Dev said that at the 2001 elections its manifesto/blueprint set out all that the party and its predecessor groups had been saying over the years in terms of a new political culture and to accept that the parties are ethnic parties by and large but in government had to govern in the interest of all the people.
"He said that by definition ROAR would be seen as an Indian party but that is not to say that is what it would be for all times but to accept that is where it now is."
Dev says that it forces a party, if its support base is Indian, to realise that you could not govern as an Indian party.
Dev has discounted the possibility of joining up with either the PPP or PNC because of the possibility of ROAR being swallowed up by either of the two because of the disequilibrium of size and nothing would be solved.
He stressed that it is the PPP and the PNC who represent the two largest racial groups in the country that must coalesce.
Dev observes that in the absence of those two parties making real moves rather than jockeying for better positions, as he gleaned from perusing the book of the compilation of letters between Jagan and (Forbes) Burnham, ROAR's strategy is that both parties should be denied a majority in the parliament. "Therefore by the logic of our constitutional system in place that means that the PPP really at this juncture has to be denied a majority because the PNC is not going to have a majority based on the way we see it, contrary to what all their statisticians may tell them about the nature of politics in Guyana."
He says that if ROAR either by itself or with an alliance of the smaller parties can take away that majority from the two parties and if the grouping is committed to a government of national reconciliation then that would be the way to go. "That remains our strategy to today."
He says that as an example of what ROAR stands for even though it describes itself as an Indian party, it is the only party that has questioned the fact that the PPP decided to modernize the sugar industry without consulting the rest of the society.
"We looked back historically and saw that the PPP's 1960 development of Black Bush (Polder) was the single greatest factor in convincing African Guyanese that the PPP was ``a coolie rice government" as the New Nation of the time reminded. Similarly when I questioned the fact of the lack of consultation by the PPP on going ahead with the modernization of sugar which is the only time that the PPP has stood up to the World Bank."
The ROAR leader says too that though his party believes that agriculture is the way to go for Guyana on a comparative basis, because of the national orientation of its programme it is concerned about what that would mean for African Guyanese who are mainly urban. "We define ourselves as an Indian party because of the support base not because of our programme. But it came out like that because of the polemical nature adopted with the beatings of January 12, 1998."
However, he says that the party's constitution says that membership is open to all ethnic groups and it has African Guyanese as members as well as Portuguese and Amerindians.
"We feel that if the parties can accept for now where they are and work together at the governmental level people will begin to see that there is nothing wrong in saying that you represent certain interests also better than others."
Dev says that whether we like it or not people have cleaved along ethnic lines because they are more honest than the politicians. "I think we do have ethnic differences that come out in real terms in having difference in terms of how we define the good life and how we define political goods so to speak."
He explains, "Slavery and creole culture have made African Guyanese's orientation towards the economy different from the orientation of immigrants who came here to make a buck. If you pretend that the two groups don't have different orientation to the economy and you blithely go along having so-called economic programmes that you think are value free, it is not value free in its implementation."
Dev observed that the question is are African Guyanese as equipped as the Portuguese and Indians or are Amerindian Guyanese equipped for this economy of free enterprise .... in terms of how they see profit, how they see deferred gratification and orienting their children into business.
"I don't think the cultural expectations are the same. Therefore they would have to be programmed and if you want to achieve certain goals now there would have to be some form of affirmative action programme for African Guyanese because in a sense you tend to run a race that slavery and its consequences broke your leg. But unless you are speaking honestly you cannot say that!"