Shal­iza?Has­sanali

Chair­man of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan in­sists that Fri­day's march by trade unions and the PNM is an in­di­ca­tion that they need to lis­ten and start ad­dress­ing con­cerns of cit­i­zens. Ex­press­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments dur­ing a Street Talk ex­er­cise in Ari­ma yes­ter­day was par­ty leader, Prakash Ra­mad­har.

Ra­mad­har said while peo­ple have a right to vent their feel­ings, one needs to en­sure that op­por­tu­ni­ties like these are not used for po­lit­i­cal gains to dam­age the sta­bil­i­ty of the coun­try. He ques­tioned:?"Where were the cit­i­zens who want to pro­tect our democ­ra­cy when there was ev­i­dence of po­lit­i­cal ma­nip­u­la­tion in the ar­rest of our for­mer chief jus­tice?

"That was a huge blow to democ­ra­cy. How come po­lit­i­cal relics of the past are com­ing for­ward now when they had op­por­tu­ni­ties in the past to change the sys­tem and did not take the ben­e­fit of that op­por­tu­ni­ty?" Ra­mad­har ad­mit­ted that the coun­try need­ed to get down to work.

With re­gards to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er's com­ment that the march had at­tract­ed one par­tic­u­lar race, Ra­mad­har said the COP has al­ways main­tained that T&T "is too small to be di­vid­ed along any lines." Ques­tioned if the demon­stra­tion was a wake up call for the Gov­ern­ment, Ra­mad­har said the par­ty has spo­ken on all na­tion­al is­sues "as dif­fi­cult as it is."

Asked if he was con­cerned that the Prime Min­is­ter had not raised her voice against state­ments made by Warn­er and if he in­tends to tack­le the mat­ter head-on, Ra­mad­har said that was a mat­ter for the PM to re­spond to.