Today as the UNC celebrates its 20th birthday with an interfaith service at its Rienzi headquarters, I am republishing a column I originally wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on the eve of the Nov. 5, 2007 general election.Much has changed since then and the two men who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in that election are now at loggerheads. That continuing story is for another today. Today, I invite you to read about BASDEO PANDAY AND THE POLITICS OF OPPOSITION.
For those who don’t know him Basdeo Panday is a convenient whipping boy for many of the ills that plague his party and the other political movements in which he has been involved. The warfare in the party that led to the splintering and the departure of its leader, Winston Dookeran, leaving to form the Congress of the People (COP) is one example.
Dookeran and his supporters still blame Panday for the fallout, ignoring the fact that it was Panday who signed Dookeran’s nomination papers for the party’s internal elections and requested that no one oppose him.
But it was Dookeran who wanted nothing to do with the old structure and attempted to discard everything and everyone who didn’t agree with him, including Panday.
The end result was a re-invigorated Basdeo Panday and a UNC Alliance that is today challenging the COP, and even threatening its very existence, and the People’s National Movement (PNM) of Patrick Manning.
Panday’s supporters had remained dormant and confused, perhaps even depressed, during the bickering that went on for most of the five years following the last election in 2002. And for a while it seemed that they were buying the wholesale propaganda of new politics.
The PNM’s persecution of Panday, his sentencing for failing to declare a London bank account and the propaganda surrounding the case, contributed to dampening the enthusiasm. But the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the case on the grounds of political interference marked a turning point.
Anand Ramlogan, who is now running as candidate for another party (COP) in the 2007 election, had this to say about the case and his client:
"Panday was not charged with corruption, and for those who know him he is virtually incorruptible. His personality and traits have no leaning towards materialism and ostentation, and his primary concern and love is politics…The PNM had persecuted Panday for a technical offence that has been committed by dozens of public officials over the years with impunity."
Panday’s insistence on unity and his coalition with smaller parties and pressure groups exposed the COP’s insincerity and made people rethink their decision to migrate to the new party.
In the end many returned and the evidence was clear when the alliance was launched at a mass rally in Chaguanas on Oct. 7, which the party immediately dubbed the ‘orange revolution’.
And the final rally at Aranguez, which attracted the largest turnout any political party has ever seen in the country, has helped build a momentum that few even in the party expected one month ago.
Today Panday has risen from the political ashes like the legendary phoenix. And now polls – which must be taken with more than a little suspicion in this country – are suggesting the UNC Alliance has a chance of winning a majority and forming the next government.
The latest one by NACTA is suggesting a PNM/UNC-A race, allocating 16 seats to the PNM, 14 to the UNC-A and none to the COP. It says the rest are too close to call and can go either way.
(The election result gave the PNM 26 of the 41 seats. The UNC-A won 15 and COP got none)
Panday entered electoral politics in 1966 at a time when the PNM was well entrenched in government.
He shunned racial politics, ran for a social democratic party - The Workers and Farmers Party - in an Indian constituency and lost to the DLP candidate. But he didn’t disappear from the national scene.
In the early seventies he returned to service with the death of Bhadase Maraj and became the new Hindu/Trade Union leader in the Indian heartland in the sugar belt.
Panday skillfully used the union as a base to build support for a political movement. While he believed in a new type of politics, based on equality and respect for one another, regardless of race, religion or social standing, he would inevitably have to lean heavily on ethnic voting.
Still he believed national unity was the way to go.
As an opposition senator in 1972 he placed on record a reality that was to guide his politics throughout his career.
"Ours is too small a country," he told the Senate on September 15th, 1972, "to try to discriminate against each other. We are too dependent on one another and once you discriminate against one another you damage the entire country."
In 1975 Panday’s sugar union joined all the country’s major trade unions in a rally of solidarity from which emerged a new political party, the United Labour Front (ULF).
In the General Election of 1976 the ULF made a significant breakthrough with 10 of the 36 seats in Parliament, replacing the Indian-based DLP.
The victory was also a major disappointment for Panday who did not get the support of the black working class, especially the predominantly black workers in the oil industry.
(He told me in a recent interview it was because the nation was prepared to unite on labour and social issues it was not mature enough to do the same in politics.)
Five years later he formed an opposition alliance with his ULF, Tapia, led by economist Lloyd Best and The Democratic Action Congress (DAC) led by A.N.R. Robinson, which had won the two Tobago seats in the 1976 Parliament.
In that year a new conservative party – the Organization for National Reconstruction (ONR) – led by former PNM Attorney General Karl Hudson Phillips became the main opposition challenger. With the Alliance and ONR as the opposition, the PNM scored an easy victory.
But it was Panday who went back to Parliament as opposition leader from where he continued his efforts to build a national party based on embracing people of all races, classes and religions.
The result was a unitary party comprising all the other opposition groups. Panday as the leader with the largest block of MPs in Parliament could have easily emerged as the leader of the new National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).
But he was convinced based on his earlier political losses that the nation was not ready to accept an Indian leader as Prime Minister. So he handed the leadership of the infant party to the DAC leader Arthur N. Robinson.
In the general election of December 15, 1986 his dream became a reality when the NAR won a landslide with 33 of the 36 seats in Parliament, sweeping the PNM out of office after 30 consecutive years in power.
But it soon turned into a nightmare as conflicts developed within the ‘one-love’ movement based on race and policy conflicts.
The massive majority gave Robinson the clout to ignore Panday, knowing that he would keep a majority even if Panday left. And that is what happened, although some of the seats giving him the majority were rightfully those of Panday's ULF.
Panday and some of his loyalists quit. The others stayed, including Winston Dookeran, who later came back to Panday’s political camp, then left again and is now leading a new party – the Congress of the People (COP) – in the 2007 election.
The break with the NAR led to the formation of CLUB 88 (Committee of Love, Unity and Brotherhood) and the birth of the United National Congress (UNC), which Panday described as a movement that would attract people not because of the "colour of their skins but the content of their minds."
Panday’s nationalism – unlike that of Eric Williams, Robinson et al – had always been based on embracing Trinidad and Tobago’s diversity and celebrating its plurality.
Panday has survived the political roller coaster and continues his struggle for democracy, freedom and justice on behalf of a constituency that still yearns for these fundamental human rights nearly fifty years after Trinidad and Tobago’s leaders pulled down the Union Jack and gave birth to a nation, seeking God's blessings for a land forged "from the love of liberty", promising equality for every creed and race.
Today, six years after he was removed from office, as murderers and kidnappers roam the streets fearing no one, Panday is again leading a chorus clamouring for unity among all those who share a common concern for peace, stability and good governance. And as always, his constituency comprises mainly those whose voices are muffled in the din of political expediency.
Panday was the man who called the nation's attention to the injustices that workers suffered under the Williams PNM administration. He walked should-to-shoulder with George Weekes, Raffique Shah, Joe Young, other labour leaders and politicians on Bloody Tuesday – March 18, 1976 - to demand justice for the working class.
And though he was brutalized and jailed he remained committed to the same cause for which he fights today: freedom, equality and justice.
His detractors like to paint him with a general racist brush. But political scientist Dr Selwyn Ryan, who is no fan of Basdeo Panday, had this comment in 1991:
"His constituency comprises those elements whom he considers social and political underdogs in a society. His rhetoric is flowery and emotional. That rhetoric may annoy those who do not share its premises and values. To call it racist is, however, a gross falsehood, and those who do, say more about themselves that the person they label."
Indeed it may very well have been his commitment to building a nation where everybody would be equal that undermined him and led to his fall from power. Some people from within his party exploited discontent among the UNC heartland with the false notion that Panday deserted his Indian supporters.
Panday frequently reminded his inner circle that “his people” comprises everyone, people of every race, religion, class and colour, in every village and town. "Hunger doesn't have a colour," he once said, adding that poverty doesn’t have a religion.
His greatest passion is for uniting the people, for building a meritocracy in which everybody would be a first-class citizen unlike the one that the late Lloyd Best once described, where "everyone felt like a third-class citizen."
Many commentators who try to explain the national politics of Trinidad and Tobago society summarize everything in simplistic racial imagery.
Trinidad and Tobago is a nation that has two founding groups: slaves and indentured workers, most of Indian origin. Panday inherited the Indian base; Williams led the Africans. But there were crossovers in both parties as there are today.
Panday’s philosophy has always been the same - that any party that chooses to represent only one group is doomed because the nation’s plurality and diversity make it necessary for a government to include everyone.
When Patrick Manning assumed office in 2001 by presidential decree he tried unsuccessfully to push the UNC back to the sugar cane fields by taking the cane fields away from the UNC, leaving it without its primary constituency in the hope that instead of rising from the ashes, the UNC would retreat to a "comfort zone" of marginal politics.
But Panday has refused to ride into the sunset and go away; today at 74 he continues his struggle with a renewed urgency and an even deeper sense of national unity.
And he wrapped up the 2007 campaign at the birthplace of the UNC in Aranguez, announcing that it would be his last political battle. He urged everyone to remain united and asked for a victory for the UNC-A.
"I remember my struggle to unite this country...I have no regrets. As I come to the end of a very long journey I ask you to send me off in a blaze of glory" he said.
"Stand all!" he declared, "Bow to no one."
Jai Parasram | Couva, Trinidad - Nov. 4, 2007
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