Mrs. Jagan stands out today as the only one of the cabal of destructive politicians of the fifties that is still active in politics. I didn't read the weekend issue of the Mirror, but I read a quote from it in the Stabroek News yesterday.
It was taken from Mrs. Jagan's column in which she calls Kaieteur News a “lousy newspaper filled with nonsense.” The Stabroek quotes her as saying that she stopped reading it a long time ago because it is sensational. It is shocking that the Stabroek News could find Mrs. Jagan a valuable source to quote. The Stabroek did this because it is convenient to use Mrs. Jagan's comments because she opined that she was not in support of the withdrawal of advertisements by the government to SN.
Mr. David De Caires and Mr. Anand Persaud have displayed a large amount of opportunism and behaviour that lack an ethical content by elevating the poisonous attack of Mrs. Jagan on the Kaieteur News. If you are a person who believes in democracy, then Mrs. Jagan is a person whom you should have nothing to do with. Mrs. Jagan's ideology is unadulterated communism that contains large strands of fascist thinking. Any analyst/historian that is worth his/her salt would know that Mrs. Jagan is no friend of the Stabroek News.
There is a fight going on in the PPP leadership and Mrs. Jagan found it useful to jump on the controversy, attacking the Kaieteur News in an attempt to confront Mr. Jagdeo. She knows the withdrawal issue is a good tool with which to tackle Jagdeo because it is an unpopular decision.
But Mrs. Jagan is no supporter of press freedom in Guyana . If David De Caires knows anything about politics then he would be familiar with the culture of intolerance Mrs. Jagan stamped on the character of the PPP.
The withdrawal decision was not a random thought put in practice in a mood that took over Mr. Jagdeo. It is part of a culture that Mrs. Jagan infused her party with. How ironic that Mrs. Jagan should come to the rescue of the Stabroek News when she is responsible for the hardened, inflexible, intolerant, suspicious attitudes that deeply reside in the entire leadership of the PPP when it comes to any individual or organization that criticises the PPP.
I urge readers and Mr. De Caires to analyse Mrs. Jagan's statement in yesterday's SN. You can see the antecedents that led up to the withdrawal controversy. Let's quote Mrs. Jagan's perception of the Stabroek News. “In this column (Mrs. Jagan's Mirror column), I have several times had to refer to the perverse and mean-thinking that is expressed in the notorious letter pages (of the Stabroek), the sometimes nasty and unreasonable editorials (of the Stabroek) and the news columns (of the Stabroek) to attack the party in government. In fact, Stabroek seems dedicated to the demise of the PPP.”
Does Mr. De Caires believe this? I am not a friend of Stabroek News but I don't believe what Mrs. Jagan has written about the Stabroek News. Here is the essential point – why should anyone in this country think that armed with this conceptualisation about the Stabroek News, she did not infuse that attitude into her party colleagues including the young and impressionable Jagdeo?
The answer is that she did. And she has being doing that for more than ten years now. Mrs. Jagan sits in the executive committee and the central committee of the PPP. What do you think she has said to the meetings of those two organs the past ten years? The exact things she wrote in last weekend Mirror and which the Stabroek News was glad to quote her on.
Do the average reader and Mr. De Caires believe that these backward views of Mrs. Jagan of the Stabroek News were manufactured by Mrs. Jagan just last week or the week before? In 1999, as the consultant to the then Minister of Information, Moses Nagamootoo, I attended with Mr. Nagamootoo, a meeting at Freedom House in which all the top leaders were present. The topic was how the state media would deal with the insistence of Desmond Hoyte that Dr. Luncheon apologise when Dr. Luncheon blurted out at a dialogue session between PNC and PPP leaders that, “gentlemen, you are talking to the majority party.”
Mrs. Jagan attacked the Stabroek News and vehemently demanded that the Chronicle do more to put the news of the government in its pages. This was at a time when the Chronicle had already descended to the level of a party rag. The talk of the day in Guyana was for more balance in the state media yet Mrs. Jagan was insisting on more propaganda.
The consternation on the face of Nagamootoo betrayed his disgust with Mrs. Jagan. It was obvious she wanted two party rags, the Mirror and the Chronicle. Is this the politician that the Stabroek News finds an ally in its battle with the Jagdeo presidency?
The Stabroek News is gaining more friends as the disagreement rages on. So why embrace the position of all persons, Mrs. Janet Jagan? There is and has been no major leader in this country that has been more intolerant than Mrs. Jagan. She sees everything in life as black and white. Either you are a friend or an enemy. Either you love Cheddi or you hate him. If you are not a supporter of the PPP, then the obverse side of the coin is that you are a sympathiser of the PNC.
Mrs. Jagan never had and will never have any appreciation for the nuances of life and nature. Life and nature are simple processes – either you love or you hate. There is no middle way. It was this woman who exerted an immeasurable amount of influence on Dr. Jagan. She destroyed him politically.
In quoting Mrs. Jagan, the Stabroek News and Mrs. Jagan have done a good favour for the Kaieteur News. Well, we at Kaieteur News cannot be pro-government and play up to the PPP and the government when the matriarch of the PPP does not like us. I conclude by again making my feelings known – I do not agree with the withdrawal policy. For the fifth time in this column I go on record as saying so.
But the Stabroek News should know that the attitude that led to that withdrawal policy was definitely shaped by Mrs. Jagan ten years ago. Of that I am certain.