Patrick Castagne com­posed the words of the na­tion­al an­them way back in 1962. These his­toric words re­flect the strength of the peo­ple of our na­tion as we live in uni­ty in the midst of our di­ver­si­ty. Two lines stand out and have be­come rel­e­vant to­day against a back­ground of con­tro­ver­sy cre­at­ed by ut­ter­ances of Mr Nizam Mo­hammed, chair­man of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. The Na­tion­al An­them sings: "Here every creed and race finds and equal place, and may God bless our na­tion."

So that our chil­dren across our school sys­tem are free to sing about race and equal­i­ty but our im­port­ed Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Dwayne Gibbs and oth­er na­tion­al fig­ures seem to ob­ject Nizam Mo­hammed's re­port to a joint se­lect com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment that "The po­lice ser­vice did not re­flect the com­po­si­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go mul­ti-eth­nic so­ci­ety." We sup­port the views of Mr Mo­hammed and we con­tend that he has every right to make the ob­ser­va­tion in the House of Par­lia­ment. He is du­ty bound to hon­est­ly tell Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans what is the re­al­i­ty in the Po­lice Ser­vice.

In fact, Mr Mo­hammed re­port­ed that he re­ceived a let­ter from the Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion, Sergeant Anand Rame­sar which was al­so sent to Dwayne Gibbs, high­light­ing con­cerns re­gard­ing the eth­nic com­po­si­tion of the Pro­mo­tion­al and Ad­vi­so­ry Board of the Po­lice. Al­though the pop­u­la­tion com­prise more than 42 per cent In­do Trinida­di­ans and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 37 per cent Afro Trinida­di­ans, the five-mem­ber pro­mo­tion board are all of African de­scent. This ob­vi­ous­ly af­fects the pro­mo­tion­al prospects of In­di­ans.

Ac­cord­ing to the Sat­ur­day Ex­press of 28 March, Mo­hammed said, "Out of ten As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­ers of Po­lice, you don't have a sin­gle one of In­di­an ori­gin. Out of three Deputy Com­mis­sion­ers, none of In­di­an ori­gin. Wait, we have one Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent, you have 15, all of African ori­gin, none of In­di­an ori­gin. "Hap­pi­ly when you look at the fig­ures, you see the Su­per­in­ten­dent lev­el, you have 21 of African ori­gin and ten of East In­di­an ori­gin and since with­in re­cent times, we have been em­pha­sis­ing the ques­tion of mer­i­toc­ra­cy as op­posed to se­nior­i­ty, and Mon­day com­ing, Su­per­in­ten­dents should be writ­ing their ex­ams. The bet­ter one may move to Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dents and you may have a bet­ter mix­ture," Mo­hammed said.

Why is Nizam Mo­hammed be­ing vil­i­fied for telling the truth that was made pub­lic and drawn to the at­ten­tion of the politi­cians and the pub­lic in a pub­li­ca­tion "Eth­nic­i­ty and em­ploy­ment prac­tices in Trinidad and To­ba­go" in No­vem­ber of 1992? The Patrick Man­ning ad­min­is­tra­tion es­tab­lished a Cen­ter for Eth­nic Stud­ies whose ob­jec­tive was "to con­duct re­search in­to the prob­lems aris­ing out of cul­tur­al di­ver­sions in an ex-colo­nial so­ci­ety and to make rec­om­men­da­tions for ad­dress­ing such prob­lems in the con­text of pub­lic pol­i­cy mak­ing." The di­rec­tors of the cen­tre were Pro­fes­sor Sel­wyn Ryan and Pro­fes­sor John la Guer­ra.

These two well-re­spect­ed aca­d­e­mics re­port­ed that "all things be­ing equal, and giv­en the fact that In­do-Trinida­di­an can­di­dates are gen­er­al­ly bet­ter qual­i­fied (aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly), it should fol­low that the num­ber of In­do-Trinida­di­ans se­lect­ed for train­ing should be high­er. It seems that they tend to do less well in the in­ter­view than do their Afro-Trinida­di­an coun­ter­parts." It con­tin­ued, "For the past sev­er­al years, the mem­bers of the in­ter­view­ing pan­el have all been Afro-Trinida­di­ans. Giv­en the fact that Trinidad is a mul­ti-eth­nic so­ci­ety with na­tion­als be­long­ing to two high­ly di­ver­gent main­stream cul­tures, name­ly In­do-Trinida­di­an and Afro-Cre­ole, it is to be ex­pect­ed that cul­tur­al fac­tors could ac­count for dif­fer­en­tials in in­ter­view per­for­mance in favour of Afro-Trinida­di­ans.

"It must be not­ed here that US stud­ies on Afro-Amer­i­can In­tel­li­gence have shown that there are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in IQ re­sults when Afro-Amer­i­can chil­dren are test­ed by Afro-Amer­i­can, in­stead of White re­searchers. In­crease IQ to the ex­tent of 10 to 15 points in­di­cates the sig­nif­i­cance of cul­tur­al com­pat­i­bil­i­ty even in what is con­sid­ered a com­plete­ly im­par­tial and ob­jec­tive test. In an in­ter­view, it is vir­tu­al­ly im­pos­si­ble for an in­ter­view­er to be de­tached from his/her eth­nic com­mu­ni­ty. Giv­en the cul­tur­al du­al­i­ties of Trinidad and To­ba­go, there could well be a cul­tur­al im­ped­i­ment in­her­ent in the in­ter­view per­for­mance of In­do-Trinida­di­ans."

Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning and the PNM gov­ern­ment had the Ryan/La Guer­ra Re­port since 1992, but did ab­solute­ly noth­ing to cor­rect the built-in pro­mo­tion­al im­bal­ance of In­di­an of­fi­cers in the Po­lice Ser­vice. Even Bas­deo Pan­day was and the present PP gov­ern­ment are mor­tal­ly afraid to deal de­ci­sive­ly with vex­ing racial is­sues. And now Nizam Mo­hammed, chair­man of the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er is head­ed for sac­ri­fice. But all is not lost! Rea­son­able peo­ple see the truth and sup­port Nizam's right to speak and in an ar­ti­cle post­ed on the In­ter­net on 28 March, at­tor­ney and for­mer Sen­a­tor Robin Mon­tano wrote, "As a so­ci­ety we should not be so ready to shoot the mes­sen­ger, even when he comes with a point of view that on the face of it might seem to be un­rea­son­able. We should be pre­pared to lis­ten care­ful­ly to the mes­sage and deal with it...one way or the oth­er. Mr Mo­hammed has let this ge­nie out of the bot­tle. It can­not be stuffed back in so eas­i­ly by sim­ply fir­ing him."

Sat­narayan Ma­haraj is the

sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the

Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha