QUOTE OF THE WEEK
No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.
                                                       -- Arthur Miller

Neither boundary nor conditions

-- Deepchand Beeharry

He would have presumably left his imprints on the sands of local and regional history even if he had only stuck to his profession. As a doctor, he was called upon to care for the sick. It was then that Seewoosagur Ramgoolam had close personal encounters with an ailing and frustrated society.

Patients came to him for advice and comfort from far and near. They not only told him about their health problems but, sometimes “in tears and sometimes hardly able to contain their resentment,” they also spelt out the hundred and one causes of their economic distress and the social and industrial oppression they were prey to. At the hands of their agricultural and non-agricultural employers, under the very nose of the colonial power. Those were the days of strikes when both labourers and artisans, weary of knocking at the doors of sugarcane factories and businesses and ruined by diseases, squalor and scarcity, had no other tool to enforce their claims.

Those were the days when the working population had many path-finders but no path-breaker as such! The factory workers had quite a few fearless leaders who, though battling against odds from different directions, sent out courageous calls for the socio-economic emancipation of the proletariat. Dr Maurice Curé and a couple of others galvanised their supporters to such an extent that they were targeted by the colonial representatives and the local big planters. The insistent call and campaign for the liberation of the masses from socio-economic fetters and legal shackles was to come from a man who was in history to be known as Chacha. Chacha or the father of the Nation whose birthday is being celebrated this week in the media and amongst the people he loved so much whether they were from the villages or the towns of the country. Some of his critics, though, could not simply bear his presence and often snarled at him, sparing neither personal remarks nor his religious or cultural background. For example, when SSR, once out of respect and gratitude, threw himself at the feet of his official and honoured guest, Shri Manilall Doctor, from India, a long standing daily taunted at him, describing him as “doctère croupion”. 

Well, that did not detract chacha from his sole aim and objective – the achievement of freedom for the country where he was born and of its constitutional progress and its all-round development. The fifteen years or so that he had spent in England to finally complete his professional studies had also inured him to the blessings of liberation from foreign rule and acquainted him with the thoughts of social scientists and the ideas and ideals of other freedom fighters grouped under the Indian Majlis or of the African leaders studying in the British metropolis. But, above all, it had instilled in him the virtue of political compromise and dialogue which he had made his own to accomplish his mission. For, right from the beginning, in one of his light moments, he stated that he devoutly desired, when he was still a young boy, to become the governor of the island in order to rescue its people from tyranny and misery. He who had spent his childhood in poverty and wretched surroundings desired then to bring relief to suffering humanity. 

Whether it was the path chalked out by the Fabians, the ideological thrust of Karl Marx or the writings of English masters, they were all there to inspire and guide him to refrain from the temptations of dictatorship and the labyrinth of any communal hegemony. Well might have some of his bitter adversaries, political and socio-economic, maligned him or scorned his constitutional objectives, qualifying them as the apology for the begging bowl… well might have others regularly decried him as communally biased, yet many more though not perhaps sharing his ethnic or political affiliations were not prepared to join in the halali of one whom writers like Malcolm de Chazal, Marcel Cabon and Jean Georges Prosper described as a man of great culture and generosity. For they who, like SSR, had lived with the common people shoulder to shoulder did see that there could be no other leader who was more apt than SSR to set the country free.

There were to be many more men and women, including even those who had remorselessly opposed him or who, whether on a visit from South Africa or Australia where they immigrated or who had stayed behind, were quick to praise Chacha for the radical changes which, thanks to his vision, had taken place in the island. All that was not enough perhaps to save him and his political party from being given a strong warning of defeat by the electorate, as indeed all the other outfits have experienced now and then.

However that may be, SSR is a national figure and the path-finder of our national ambitions. To the tourists and some of us, his statue on the Caudan Waterfront or his speeches, writings and constitutional initiatives may be homage to our greatest statesman. But to those who have worked with him and known his dedication to duty and loyalty to the masses of his country, he was first and foremost a man of the people from wherever they came or to whichever class or community they belonged. As a professional, he dedicated himself to the care and relief of all those who suffered. As a statesman, his sphere of action and activities was the people. And as a man, his attention for them knew neither boundary nor conditions.