PANDAY: STAND UP AND FIGHT AGAINST KIDNAPPINGS

Speaking on the final night of 2005 annual Divali Nagar at Endeavour Road, Chaguanas, before a mammoth crowd, Panday asked: "My sisters and brothers when will you see the light? When will you say enough is enough and I will take no more."

"God only helps those who help themselves," Panday added.

Indo-Trinidadians, he said, have become prisoners in their own homes "as all the blood, sweat and tears which they have shed over the years to ensure that their families will be safe and comfortable now seem like wasted chaff blowing in the wind."

Panday said that year after year, they celebrate Divali and its significance of light over darkness "and when the season is over we go back to our homes and recede into our cocoon of cowardice" and wait until next year. "Year after year we talk, and we talk and we talk... but we never walk the talk," he added.

He said, "While you wait for next year, your husbands and wives, your fathers and mothers, your sisters and brothers, are being kidnapped, murdered, raped, and robbed."

"Instead of standing up and fighting back you busy yourself with selling out your properties for little or nothing and hiding your children and your families abroad, you then drive your oldest cars and live under the poorest conditions for fear of attracting the kidnappers."

"The property you have worked for so hard all your lives you cannot enjoy," he added. The Opposition Leader then asked, "Will the Attorney General take any action against this incitement to racial violence? Of course not, instead, his Prime Minister will perpetuate it."