HINDS’SIGHT – The Perception and Reality of Ethnic Discrimination are Real

dr david hinds, guyana chronicle

I HAVE read, as I always do, Ralph Ramkarran’s latest commentary –“Perceptions of Discrimination”- in this past weekend’s edition of the Stabroek News.

Mr Ramkarran raises a very pertinent issue that has to be persistently addressed in a country such as ours. I do hope that supporters of the Government do not see malicious intent in the comments. This column is not a response to Mr Ramkarran. Rather, it is what I hope is a continuation of the discussion. Charges of racial discrimination are a fact of life in ethnically plural societies. Such charges arise from the inevitable conflict over the distribution of common economic, political and cultural resources. This is a contentious issue even in ethnically homogenous societies. Governments are always challenged to distribute resources fairly among the different groups in the society. Very few, if any, have managed to escape the charge of discrimination. Here in Guyana, where our ethnic divide has tended to be wider and more turbulent than many, we have had more than our fair share of charges and counter-charges from the major ethnic groups and increasingly from our Amerindian community. The charges of ethnic favouritism against the PPP government of the 1960s were partly the cause of the ethnic strife during the period 1961- 64. The table turned when the PNC came to power. The Indian-Guyanese narrative of suffering is built largely around the charges of discrimination against that Government. During the PPP’s most recent tenure, African-Guyanese renewed their charges of marginalisation. And now, just three months into the new Government’s stint, the PPP has already begun to make the most extreme charges. These charges of discrimination are in all instances grounded in both reality and perception. The reality is that no Government of one ethnic group could be totally fair to other competing groups. It has never happened in the modern world. Governments are invariably pressured to be more charitable to their own constituency simply because that’s where their votes come from. And since resources are finite, discriminating in favour of one group automatically results in discrimination against the other group. This is not to discount instances where a Government has deliberately set about to discriminate against other groups. Or where some governments have made genuine attempts to satisfy some of the concerns of the opposite groups. The perception of discrimination by the out-groups is a direct outgrowth of a feeling of disenfranchisement born of a winner-take-all system whereby the winning party, often of one ethnic group, wins control of all the levers of power and the losing party-group loses all control. Out-groups automatically perceive discrimination. This explains why the PPP in a matter of weeks could move from victor to victim. In the circumstances, it is not difficult to convince Indian-Guyanese that the new Government is discriminating against them, even though members of that community are still firmly entrenched in the sectors of the political economy they controlled prior to May 11. And that the government has shown no inclination in policy or deed to interfere negatively in those sectors. Yet perception is real and eventually becomes reality. A large part of that perception is grounded in fear of total disenfranchisement. That’s why it is easy to label normal removal of political appointees from government as ethnic cleansing. It is not the first time we have heard that dreaded term in Guyana. The issue, therefore, is not so much whether the charges are true or not. In societies such as ours, most truths are ethnically determined. The major issue is how to manage the perception and reality of ethnic discrimination so that they do not lead to instability and conflict. One place to start is at the point of distributive power—the executive branch of Government. We have talked and talked about power-sharing but never acted on it. Sadly, the PNC in the early years of the 1992 PPP government complained of discrimination against its constituents but rejected power- sharing. The same is now true of the PPP in opposition. Since its first loss in 2011, it has shown no inclination to seriously pursue shared governance.