Question of betrayal

NOW that he is back as Leader of the Opposition, Mr Basdeo Panday has returned to singing his old, tiresome, irrelevant and divisive refrain. In proving us right that he has nothing new or constructive to offer his party or the country — having outlived his political usefulness — Mr Panday is resorting once more to purely racial appeals, seeking to stir up the feeling of the Indian community with his inflammatory and senseless we-against-them rhetoric.

He was at it again on Friday when he spoke at the Indian Arrival Day heritage festival at Penal sponsored by the Maha Sabha. The ex-Prime Minister told a large crowd that history was repeating itself as Indians were again "selling out", betraying "their own" for political office. He named two former MPs, Lionel Frank Seukeran, father of Junior Industry and Commerce Minister Diane Seukeran and Ashford Sinanan, uncle of House Speaker Barry Sinanan, as among the past betrayers. "Don't be surprised," he said, "there were a few selling out for a little senatorship and ambassador position." The time had come, he told his listeners, to end such betrayal. He accused the PNM government of practising racism and discrimination and urged that "people should fight according to the Mahabharat" referring to the mythical war epic of ancient India. "The Mahabharat has taught you how to fight," he declared.

The spectacle that Mr Panday now presents to the country is a truly tragic one. Having led his party from power to defeat, the ex-PM has come to the end of his long and stormy political career but will not accept the inevitable. He has shown himself to be a totally spent force with no positive or meaningful strategy to take the country forward and, in such a vacuum, his only remaining recourse is to fall back on his ethnic ancestral instincts and seek, once more, to convince members of the Indian community that they are the victims of PNM discrimination. The tragedy is deepened by the fact that Mr Panday can still get away with this kind of dangerous nonsense within the UNC, that no one or any faction in the party has the courage to attempt to put an end to it, in the interest of both the UNC and the country. Indeed, they may still choose to follow him, even though the obvious progress of our nation as a whole and its future prospects now make that kind of divisive racial incitement unwarranted, irrelevant and inimical.

Mr Panday, in fact, insults the intelligence of Indians when he depicts those who have joined the PNM in the interest of serving their country as betrayers of "their own." We need hardly make the point the many notable Indians have distinguished themselves in the service of the government as members of the oldest political party in TT. But the "sell-out" charge by the ex-PM becomes a huge absurdity when it is examined against the ardent call for unity by Mr Panday while he was in office. At that time he fervently wooed a number of Afro-Trinidadians into the ranks of his government without the slightest thought that they were selling out or betraying "their own." He fervently proclaimed the UNC government as "all inclusive." Now that he is tasting the bitter fruit of defeat on the Opposition benches, Mr Panday has suddenly lost his great appetite for inclusiveness and unity of the races. He personally recruited Afros into his UNC administration, but it now pleases him to brand Indians serving under the PNM government as betrayers of their own. We would like to believe, however, that the Indian community, with the rest of the country, has passed the stage of falling for that kind of inanity.