What Haunts the Parliamentary Opposition Alliance Talks
16.05.2023
It is clearly difficult for the Labour Party, the MMM and the PMSD to make the alliance they all say they need, and they all know they need, in order to even hope to defeat the incumbent MSM-led alliance at the next elections. Why? It is at least partly because of the “memory” of the people. In today’s world of people writing (and reading) any passing junk idea on social media, that then seems to disappear, we might convince ourselves that “people forget”. That not just “parol anvole”, but even “lekritir lor medya sosyal anvole”. But, the hard fact is that memory is sometimes a stark reality.
MMM haunted by 2014 Ramgoolam attacks, and Labour haunted by Bérenger 2014 attacks
One of the reasons it is so difficult for the Opposition Alliance to get concretized is that the MMM is haunted by the previous alliance it had with Ramgoolam in 2014. Conversely, Labour is haunted by the same previous alliance with Bérenger. There was the numerical defeat they both suffered, for a start. Each party was, at that time realistically, supposed to represent some 40% of electors. When the two parties came together in the 2014 alliance against the MSM, instead of winning 80% of the vote, they won less than 40% of the votes. This created the Kreol saying, a saying that undermines arithmetic in politics and buries linear thinking in politics: “40 plis 40 kapav fer mwins ki 40”. But, it was not just the numerical defeat that left them traumatized, but the way that the Ramgoolam Labour Party attacked its own ally, Bérenger, and the whole episode of “requin blanc”, while the MMM undermined Ramgoolam at the same time, saying he would have no real power in the supposed power-sharing platform they had set up together. The MMM is still traumatized. What is left of the MMM, anyway. Labour, too, has remained traumatized. Labour agents, in any case, often have two parties – either Labour or, when it is in disarray, the MSM. This was first realized by a then LALIT member who lived and worked near Bassin, who noticed it as early as in the 1980s.
But this “memory” from 2014 is not the only one haunting the alliance negotiations.
PMSD haunted by past Ramgoolam treachery to Gaetan Duval
The second reason is that the PMSD is haunted by a previous act of perhaps the worst-ever treachery on a personal level in politics. The late Gaetan Duval was hoping for just one miserable ticket to stand with Ramgoolam’s Labour in 1995 elections. Navin Ramgoolam dragged this bait in front of Duval until, at the last moment, Navin Ramgoolam just cut him out, left him standing high and dry. The PMSD that glorifies Gaetan Duval as its main past hero, still remembers this treachery with horror. This is true, even though, at the time, the PMSD may well have been a separate entity from Gaetan Duval.
Conclusion
Although the fast media cycles make people seem to be creatures without memories, the human capacity of “memory” is a reality check that defies this appearance. So, one of the things that makes it difficult to make alliances today is that past treachery carries a price in present memory – a vivid memory exists amongst the most advanced analysts in the broad masses, and also amongst the party agents at grassroots level. This is the value of human experience. And traumatic memory is seared into the brain in a way it is hard to deny afterwards. These past traumatic experiences of catastrophic alliances continue to influence the present. The influence is all the greater because the three parties trying to ally – the PMSD, Labour and the MMM – have not even got a shared analysis of society, nor any shared common understanding of what to do together, collectively, to make society better: in short they have no program to bind them together. So, in this programmatic vacuum, the traumas of the past, which may seem to have been forgotten, haunt the present.
This is a story with a moral: dishonesty has long term real, negative consequences for its practitioners. Even if this dishonesty is the result of mere political opportunism or expediency, it affects one’s political possibilities. Your past dishonesty closes in on you in your own future.
All this to say that it is important that a huge mass movement behind a working class program gets built up soon enough to prevent society from not just economic ruin, but also political bankruptcy.
LALIT (after discussion at its Central Committee meeting)
