OPINION: The Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023 is emancipatory, and here to stay!

Last Updated on Sunday, 21 January 2024, 7:26 by Denis Chabrol

By Dr. Randy Persaud, Professor Emeritus

I do not normally use this column to respond to anyone, but today I must. This is because Andre Brandli who lives in Germany, and who is clueless about Guyana, just published the worst type of ad hominem attack against me in Kaieteur News and Stabroek News. Note that these two outlets regularly refuse to publish my letters. This includes refusal to a letter on Budget 2024 that was sent to them on January 17.

Readers should know that despite his very lengthy article, Brandli does not refute a single point I made about either about Bharrat Jagdeo, or about the Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023. Instead, Brandli jumps around from one inaccuracy to another, from one name-calling to another, and from one emotional outburst to a congeries of personal insults.

Brandli states that if someone does not know Guyana, they would, based on my article, think Jagdeo is the president. But unlike Bradli, the reader would have seen from the first sentence that I addressed Jagdeo as the General Secretary of the PPP. Jagdeo’s speech at Babu John, which was the fulcrum of my article, was also in the capacity of General Secretary. Let’s get to the core of The Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023 which Brandli does not address.

I wrote – “The core of the Jagdeo Doctrine is worth restating – We will fight people with all of our strength, whichever quarters they come from who seek to divide our people along ethnic lines and to reverse the progress that we have made and who tried to take away our freedom,” (emphasis in the original).

I made it clear that “[t]he Jagdeo Doctrine is partly in response to a new variant of political subversion. This strain is composed of an admixture of foreign and domestic social forces who use the global history of Black Oppression to disguise their own virulent strategy of racialized political mobilization. When they do this, they knowingly attempt to divide the people of Guyana into racial enclaves. Their intended objective is to take state power through a politics of racialization.”

In the above, I clearly state the content of the ‘doctrine.’ I also provide a rationale for its emergence and situate in the historical and contemporary dialectics of Guyanese society. But more than that, I go the extra mile to provide General Secretary Jagdeo’s own reasoning of the doctrine from within the womb of the PPP. On this score, Bharrat Jagdeo did something truly remarkable. He admitted that the PPP had not done enough to diversify the party, and publicly committed himself to fixing the problem. Note that I specifically pointed out that President Ali ‘s construction of One Guyana is another form of the same politics of inclusion called for by Jagdeo.

None of these fundamental points is addressed by Brandli. Instead, this man of research simply cut and pasted parts of my article without evaluating any of them, or without the most minimal effort at analysis.

Rather than a sober, or even passionate engagement with what I argued, Brandli is content to make fantastic and irresponsible connections such as likening Jagdeo to Putin and Xi Jinping. I have bad news for the alienated Professor Brandli, Jagdeo was elected president of Guyana more than once, and he is the only leader in the history of the Caribbean who signed a term-limit which took him out of office.

For a man who does research, Brandli does not have even the most basic information about the object of his emotional outburst. Let me help him.

First, I hold the title Professor of International Relations, not Associate Professor. Brandli knows the difference between the two is vast, but laziness prevented him from getting my title right. Secondly, the whole of Guyana and even those in the diaspora know that I am employed by the Government of Guyana in the capacity of Adviser in the Office of the President. Yet, Brandli wants to know if I work pro bono!

Brandli says he has worked at several universities and “…never came across such a clumsy and ingratiating propaganda…” Well, had Brandli only read what has come out on the Iraq war from places like Yale and Harvard on international affairs or comparative politics he would never have so publicly embarrassed himself.

For my part, I have spoken at University of Guyana, UWI (T&T); University of Toronto; McMaster; Guelph University, Carleton University, City University of New York (Graduate Centre), UCLA, Georgetown University, New York University, University of Kentucky, University of Connecticut,  Virginia Tech, Tufts University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Wake Forest University, Queen’s University (Belfast), University of Sussex, City University of London, London School of Economics, University of Nottingham; University of Kent, University Trento (Italy), International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), Chubu University (Nagoya, Japan), University of Science and Technology (Tokyo, Japan), Korea University, National Chengchi, (Taiwan); and The American University of Sharjah, UAE.

I have also consulted with the World Bank, US Department of State, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and inter alia, the United Nations University.

I can tell you despite my wide-ranging international experience, I have never seen something as mediocre as Professor Andre Brandli’s response to my arguments about the internal transformation of the politics of the PPP. What is particularly sad about the alienated Professor Brandli, is that rather than join the fight against the racialization of politics, he has chosen to be a foreign rabble-rouser, all for a little of attention. Sad! Brandli should know that the Jagdeo Doctrine of 2023 is emancipatory and here to stay. It is the new social ontology of the PPPC.

Dr Randy Persaud is Adviser, International Affairs, Office of the President