Dear Editor,
Travelling across India over fifteen days from the North to the centre to the South of the country, spending time in New Delhi and in several cities including Agra, Varanasi, Vrindavan, Mathura, Ayodhya, and Lucknow, capital city of Uttar Pradesh; Kolkata, capital city of West Bengal; Chennai, capital city of Tamil Nadu; Nagpur, ‘The Tiger Capital’ of Maharashtra and Mumbai as its capital city, was a totally exhilarating, educational and mind-boggling exercise. The contrasting nature of the four states and eleven cities I visited is of unimaginable and striking proportions.
This will be my 8th visit to India. My first visit was in 1982 to attend an international peace conference; In 1993, I accompanied President Cheddi Jagan on a state visit; In 2000, I led a delegation to the 3rd session of the Guyana-India Joint Commission; In 2003, accompanied President Bharrat Jagdeo on a state visit;
In 2005, I participated in a G33+Small Economies Consultative Meeting; In 2006, I was part of a CARICOM mission to India; And in 2018, I was part of a delegation of 17 PPP MPs.
All my previous visits were official and were organized within the confines of established protocol, while visits to places of interest and historic sites, were decided by our hosts. However, on this occasion, since my visit was private and the itinerary so determined, I was able to see what I never saw on previous visits save to those to Goa and Puducherry which I did on my own in 2018 at the conclusion of official business.
My visits to Goa and Puducherry were extremely interesting, in that, as former Portuguese and French enclaves, the buildings have maintained their Portuguese and French architectural features, while the names on buildings at some places, it’s streets and squares were visibly and closely resembled what I had seen before in Brazil and Guadeloupe. The traditional cuisine and refreshments were available at restaurants in both cities. That was eight years ago, India is changing and doing so rapidly. Admirably, It has managed to creatively blend, the traditional with the modernist India.
The high point of my visit to India on this occasion was to connect and establish personal and direct relationship with someone who I discovered, bore the same surname as mine. He is a retired judge by the name of Kishore Jayram Rohee living in the city Nagpur, in the State of Maharashtra. I became aware of Justice Rohee’s existence through a friend of mine who having done the research found the name of a family with the name Rohee living in Nagpur. I spoke to the Judge on the phone in 2018 when I was in Goa. Since then, we maintained contact by email. I included Nagpur in my itinerary and was extremely happy and deeply grateful to him having found the time to meet with me and family while in Nagpur and before I left the city. It was an historic occasion for bonding between two families, the geographic and differences in our respective heritages notwithstanding.
Over the course of my eleven-city visit, I was impressed and depressed with what I saw. Impressed with the great strides India has made by previous governments and the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) administration in areas of public health, education, electronics, scientific institutions, pharmaceuticals, poverty alleviation, housing, physical infrastructure, information technology, robotics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, potable water, the hotel and tourism industries, medical tourism, light and heavy manufacturing, transportation and much, much more. Information about these achievements were gathered from guides and daily newspapers at hotels.
Suffice it to say, I was emotionally moved and deeply distressed by the prevalence and wide-spread manifestations of poverty and apparent marginalization of the poor and dispossessed living under bridges and in slums in some cities; not to mention the widespread untidiness, lack of sanitation, uncontrolled traffic management and congestion to the degree of what looked like traffic anarchy in some cities. Surprisingly, the hazardous and unsanitary conditions notwithstanding, a high level of tolerance and level-headedness amongst road users, including motorists, buses, hand-pulled rickshaws and motorized ‘Tuk-Tuks’ plus the hundreds of pedestrians moving from place to place as if in a hurry would make any foreigner watch in awe.
Of great puzzlement to me was to see how the affluent and better-off in India live side by side with the high levels of poverty, questionable, but customary pavement dwellers, food cooking and vending, bathing, tailoring and shaving on pavements alongside heaps of garbage.
From my limited knowledge about and observation of the dynamics of Indian society, the dispossessed must have some basic knowledge about how and what the upper classes and privileged social strata do to get by and what they in turn must do in order to survive. And although they co-exist alongside each other under remarkably different conditions, those at the very lowest level seem either unable or reluctant to lift themselves out of what appears to be both depressing and oppressing socio-economic conditions. It is as if a modus viviendi characterized by ‘live and let live’ prevails.
Throughout my visits from State to State, I learnt a lot more about the caste system in India and how it plays out with Dalits, Brahmins, Muslims, and Yadavs as well as with the Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities) and upper castes. With the help of professional guides, I was able to better understand how the caste system manifests itself at the economic and social levels in cities and villages in India.
Over the course of my visit, I saw how the deeply religious populace of India is bound by their spiritual and religious beliefs. But the puzzling question for me was, has the caste and religious peculiarities of Indian society acted as a brake or have they, with the help of the intellectual, better educated classes and patriotic big business helped India’s meteoric rise as a global power? My answer would be yes and no, although it is quite obvious to the discerning eye that the economic and social policies of the Modi administration coupled with its political will and tenacity have managed to grapple with the myriad challenges facing the country. According to Modi; “Today India’s confidence is at an unprecedented high. We are pursuing reforms with a clear policy direction. For us, reforms are not a compulsion. Reforms are our conviction.”[1]
Addressing the question of ‘trust’ which he deemed a fundamental question confronting the world, Modi said; “Trust that a partner country will stand by you during moments of crisis. And it is here that India stands before you with a different outlook and a different way of thinking.”
“It is clear,” he stressed; “We do not grow at anyone’s expense. We grow with the world, and for the world.”
Yet it is hard for some foreigners like me to conceptualize how challenging it must be for the governing BJP to find social, economic and cultural solutions to unemployment, low-cost housing, affordable health care, and education as well as cheap public transportation by river, air, rail or road notwithstanding the great strides India has made becoming one of few countries in the world with a highly educated populace. According to PM Modi, the solution is to be found in his adopted slogan of ‘atmanirbhar bharat,’ or ‘self-reliant India.’[2]
The contrast among the States I visited is most compelling. New Delhi is currently undergoing an impressive social and infrastructural transformation. It is pleasing to see that while new modern buildings are springing up all around, the well preserved heritage buildings, the city has maintained its captivating green surroundings and environment.
Over the course of the visit to Uttar Pradesh we visited Agra where foreign and local tourists flock to feast their eyes on The Taj Mahal. At the same time, a rather puzzling feature for the eyes to behold is the strong dedication and enthusiasm for popular participation in religious events such as pilgrimages to Vrindavan, the birthplace of Lord Krishna and Mathura, where we were told he spent his childhood days. The celebration of Ganga Arti at Varanasi on the bank of the Holy Ganges river where millions of Hindus across the Indian subcontinent converge to perform religious rituals was a sight to see. Even more interesting was to witness the masses of believers who flock to the beautiful temple at Ayodhya to pay homage to their beliefs.
India is a country where anyone who wishes to observe, absorb and reflect should visit and spend time moving from city to city across the various states. While visiting Kolkata, I took
the opportunity to visit a port where a monument now stands in homage to those who left India to be bound as indentured labourers at plantations in the Caribbean including Guyana.
Incidentally, according to Indian newspaper reports, a senior US official recently designated Foreign (Indian) Professional Green Card holders as ‘Indentured servants’. This denigrative mischaracterization of highly qualified Indian professionals was roundly criticized, and understandably so, by the Indian government.
But notwithstanding the compelling stories of India’s ancient civilization, captivating beauty, natural splendor, huge population and tremendous advances made all around, our cultural heritages and religious differences apart, I am proud of the fact that my own country has a rich history and multi-culturalism reflected in the lyrics of our patriotic songs, literature, dance and music. Guyana has also advanced significantly economically and socially.
India and Guyana respectively are huge and small geographically and population-wise with their own peculiar problems. At the moment, there is a common problem related to the two countries’ election commissions.
In Guyana’s case, Although the Guyana Elections Commission ((GECOM) has not convened a meeting since September 6, 2025, GECOM remains functional. Its Secretariat continues to execute its budgeted work programme, particularly registration activities under the National Registration Act.
As regards India, a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ list was carried out by the Elections Commission of India (ECI) ostensibly to ‘clean India’s voter list of duplicates and discrepancies.’
In the course of the exercise, nearly a billion people in the world’s biggest democracy are being asked to show documents to prove that they should keep the right to vote.
The ECI claims it has discovered and aims to delete over 20 million dead people and 90 million others categorized as ‘absent, shifted, and others’ from the list. So far, it has expunged over 130 million names.
The opposition political parties have mounted a political campaign branding the SIR ‘Vote Chori’ or ‘vote stealing.’[3] Protest marches are being held across India. Representation has been made at the highest level of the judicial system of India. The court has asked opposition leader Gandhi to prove vote stealing.[4]
In the midst of calls for the resignation of the Chief Elections Commissioner and the scrapping of the SIR, the IEC is standing firm in the face of opposition parties united under the banner of the ‘India Bloc’ and Chalo Dilli’ or ‘Let’s go to Delhi’ call by Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi. Meanwhile, the ruling BJP has rejected the claim of the united opposition deeming their protest actions as ‘vote bank politics.’ and that they should ‘produce any evidence they have of ‘vote chori’ or vote stealing before the Supreme Court.’
I will certainly miss the hustle and bustle of life in India; the streets that never sleep; the constant beeping and honking all at the same time, of horns of buses, trucks, cars, taxis, the Tuk-Tuks, scooters and motor cycles and their near but miraculous avoidance of colliding with each other and the traffic ranks who rather coolly and calmly do their jobs. India is a country where everyone everywhere seem to be in a hurry. Even the food and tea vendors are always busy. I will miss pondering over the sight of pavement dwellers and children playing in slums; thinking about the school children hurrying to or home from school held surprisingly on Saturdays and Sundays. And the youths who, with expressions of determination on their faces seem to be on missions to carve out for themselves one profession or another in a country that PM Modi described as one that “…lifted 250 million people out of poverty over the past decade, a number greater than the population of many countries in the world.”
Clement J. Rohee
References
- PM Modi Said India’s Confidence Is at an Unprecedented Highwww.vygrnews.com ↩
- PM Modi's Independence Day Speech: Operation Sindoor Would Not Have Succeeded If India Was Not Atmanirbharwww.ndtv.com ↩
- Election Commission big moves demanded by Rahul Gandhi amid SIR protestswww.indiatoday.in ↩
- SC junks petition for SIT probe into Rahul Gandhi’s voter list manipulation charge - The Tribunewww.tribuneindia.com ↩
- Impressed and depressed over my India visit in Kiskadee Watch, October 28, 2026