Here's a question from somebody not very familiar with the Guyanese politics. What are the major differences between the two parties other than one being mostly Indo-Guyanese and the other Afro-Guyanese?
The PPP was Cheddi Jagan's party. It was a typical Anglo West Indian labour party of the late colonial/early post colonial period, though Jagan's famously brusque manner and perhaps somewhat excessive enjoyment of grand rhetorical flourishes meant that Colonial Office and State Department officials tended to assume that he and it were much more radical than was actually the case. This had deeply unfortunate consequences for both Jagan and Guyana. These days it is a typical Anglo West Indian labour party of whatever we're calling the present period.
The PNC was Forbes Burnham's party. Burnham was one of the founders of the PPP with Jagan, but he was also crypto-communist and this fundamental ideological divide caused the party to split. In one of the most bleakly farcical episodes in the history of the twentieth century Caribbean, the State Department and the Colonial Office misdiagnosed the situation completely and assumed that Burnham was a conservative labour man akin to Jamaica's Alexander Bustamante and that the PNC was analogous to the JLP. Once firmly established in power thanks to his deluded foreign friends, Burnham did briefly govern as a moderate, but he showed his true colours soon enough and governed Guyana as a dismal quasi-communist state until his death, permanently damaging the economy of the country in the process. These days the reformed postcommunist PNC is essentially a race-baiting protection racket that runs candidates in elections, which, ironically, means that it does indeed now strongly resemble the JLP.
