By GHK Lall- President Ali is a better actor daily. He put in a fine performance recently on social media about Dr. David Hinds’ combustible detonations directed at African Guyanese now in the PPP camp. Dr. Hinds used some scorching words on his program Politics 101 that incinerated more than his objects of derision. They incensed President Ali who rushed to defend his new converts. Caring or politicking, that is the question.
The president called out Guyanese in the media to call out Dr. Hinds. Though not of the media cadre per se, I am in the media, and a monthly presence on Politics 101. I call out Dr. Hinds for his lapse in judgement, his hurtful choice of words. I consider him a brother.
This is what brothers and keepers do. He has the intellectual gifts and spiritual groundings to be more circumspect in these ultra-correct, ultra-sensitive times. David Hinds must exercise them. What was normal previously, is now abnormal. Take the high ground, Dr. Hinds.
Now that the president issued his broad call, I turn his way, call him out. He railed on social media that what Dr. Hinds did was ‘divisive, racist.’ I look at President Ali: there’s a brother similarly bespectacled, with two working eyes. He is not a one-eyed man; shouldn’t comport himself like one. What I say in the next few sentences also applies to that other bespectacled, two-eyed genius, bhai Bharrat Jagdeo. Both can be selective, and among the best where ‘divisive, racist’ comments can be interpreted, inferred.
It is what I think of, how I interpret, their calculated political appeals to tribalism. Example: weekly, almost at every public opportunity, both President Ali and VP Jagdeo have spoken about how well the PPP is doing. Jolly good! But they don’t stop there. They are not themselves if they don’t interrupt their flow and insert a raucous beating on the PNC for all the unpardonable wrongs it committed. I question how that is not divisive, racist, in a Guyana now more sharply, bitterly polarized than ever. Where is the utility for national unity in those diatribes?
Hypothetically: When a pandit, pastor or imam trashes his religious counterparts, then that insulted house of God is demeaned, its worshippers are, and its wider cohort of believers are degraded. I contend that that is precisely what the sitting president and former president are doing. Dividing Guyana into camps by highlighting who is good and who is evil, who represents pure light, who is utter darkness. What else is there left to think, other than their couched but naked appeals to tribal prejudices are divisive. Remember and never forget who did what for 28 years, and five years ago. How are those not racist soundings? Ali holds forth that Hinds went too far.
I assert that he and Jagdeo should know the damage they do to the African Guyanese psyche through what their words, postures. Black tribunes, Black leaders held as Black heroes by Black people, are profaned and the work of their hand is besmirched. But the victimized and demonized should not be agitated. Looks and sounds racially-tinged and divisive to me.
Look at their audiences. One remembers; the other takes the whiplashes on their backs and avert their gazes. In their untimely, unhinging, and uncalled for volatile outbursts against the PNC (historically grounded [or not]), I believe that subtle, supple racist, divisive exercises are at work.
If President Ali and VP Jagdeo haven’t seen matters this way before, I vaporize that stultifying membrane imprisoning their minds.
David Hinds spoke pointblank and he is hauled over the coals. Because of his radical activity when countless Guyanese were fleeing or cowering, there came 1992, and since. It was a time when men didn’t hide behind political correctness. They faced batons, boots, other brutalities, and those iron bars.
Ali and Jagdeo are inheritors of the legacy powered by Hinds and others, some Indian, some dead, some dragging today. It is glib to talk about democracy and its rights nowadays. It is grimy for President Ali to ignore its blights, now flourishing under the PPP Government,
Last, President Ali is a Guyanese, as I believe. He is getting too good as pretending to be Central or Latin American, given his special cherry-picking skills. Dr. Ali talks about those in the media who should call out Dr. Hinds, but are not. I just did, and now I call out Excellency Ali himself.
Where were you, Dr. President, when a glorious Guyanese in Dr. Jagdeo’s media stable bashed and trashed a former PPP head of state of Guyana? Who did you call out, Mr. President when that vile attack extended to the former PPP president’s family? What are you about President Ali, when people like me are wrongfully reviled by your comrades in your cabinet for exercising democratic rights? Why the refuge in silence, comrade leader and brother?
I am tempted to state that it is during times like those that President Ali reveals his limitations, his imbalances, and his lackluster claims to things profound, even merely intellectual. I don’t. Double standards and platitudes, I can stand. Rank hypocrisies make me see red. Enough said.
