Sat Ma­haraj

When my friend Prof Sel­wyn Cud­joe in­vit­ed me to de­liv­er the fea­ture ad­dress at the launch of his lat­est pub­li­ca­tion, In­di­an Time Ah Come In Trinidad and To­ba­go, my first re­sponse was that this was a set-up. Was Sel­wyn at­tempt­ing to por­tray Sat Ma­haraj and In­di­ans in gen­er­al as a group glo­ri­fy­ing in the po­lit­i­cal suc­cess of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship in a boast­ful way?

Were we be­ing por­trayed as peo­ple about to in­vade the na­tion­al trea­sury and oth­er state fa­cil­i­ties be­cause "our time ah come?"Af­ter read­ing most of Dr Cud­joe's col­lec­tion, I am now of the view that the ti­tle In­di­an Time Ah Come may be Cud­joe's way of ad­mit­ting that at no time did In­di­ans en­joy equal­i­ty un­der a PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion and that our time "ah now come for equal treat­ment un-der the Con­sti­tu­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go."

The na­tion­al an­them sings "Here every creed and race have an equal place" but we know for a fact that in re­al­i­ty this has nev­er been so.

Cas­es in point:

1. The Ma­ha Sab­ha ra­dio li­cence. The PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion led by Patrick Man­ning dis­crim­i­nat­ed against the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha when we ap­plied for a ra­dio broad­cast li­cence. In­stead it gave a li­cence over-night to its sup­port­er, Louis Lee Sing, to whose sta­ble my friend Prof Cud­joe be­longs.

Af­ter years of le­gal strug­gle it took the Privy Coun­cil in Lon­don and its five British judges to com­mand the Man­ning ad­min­is­tra­tion to cease the dis­crim­i­na­tion and grant the Ma­ha Sab­ha a ra­dio li­cence. This is part of the his­to­ry of T&T.

2. The Chris­t­ian Trin­i­ty Cross had been the high­est na­tion­al award of­fered to cit­i­zens who have per­formed great ser­vice on be­half of the na­tion.

The Ma­ha Sab­ha again had to re­ly on the Privy Coun­cil in Lon­don to cor­rect this dis­crim­i­na­tion and en­sure our time "ah come."

3. In an­swer to our charge that re­cruit­ment in the pub­lic ser­vice re­flect­ed a racial im­bal­ance that place In­di­ans al­most out­side the re­cruit­ing process, PNM Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning ap­point­ed two vet­er­an Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies lec­tur­ers, Sel­wyn Ryan and John Le Guer­ra, to con­duct an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to our claim.

They pro­duced a com­pre­hen­sive find­ing, part of which spoke of re­cruit­ment in the Po­lice Ser­vice. They found: "All things be­ing equal, and giv­en the fact that In­do-Trinida­di­an can­di­dates are gen­er­al­ly bet­ter qual­i­fied (aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly), it should fol­low that the num­bers 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. For the past sev­er­al years, the mem­bers of the in­ter­view­ing pan­el have all been Afro-Trinida­di­ans ... it is to be ex­pect­ed that cul­tur­al fac­tors could ac­count for dif­fer­en­tials in in­ter­view per­for­mance in favour of Afro-Tri­ni-da­di­ans."Noth­ing was ever done to cor­rect this ob­vi­ous dis­crim­i­na­tion found by Ryan and Le Guer­ra.

In his in­tro­duc­tion, Cud­joe writes:

"The ti­tle es­say In­di­an Time Ah Come traces the rise of East In­di­an po­lit­i­cal pow­er from in­den­ture­ship to the tri­umph of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship (PP) of which Per­sad-Bisses­sar is the leader. It de­bunks the no­tion that In­di­ans were dis­crim­i­nat­ed against in elec­tive pol­i­tics from the time it be­came an op­tion in 1925."

The ev­i­dence is over­whelm­ing that the PNM gov­ern­ment adopt­ed a de­lib­er­ate pol­i­cy to dis­crim­i­nate in favour of its own sup­port­ers and against those of the op­po­si­tion of which the ma­jor­i­ty were In­di­ans.Lat­er in his in­tro­duc­tion, how­ev­er, Cud­joe con­cedes that "some of us were speak­ing out when the Ho­n­ourable Patrick Man­ning, for­mer Prime Min­is­ter of the coun­try, was do­ing things to un­der- mine the democ­ra­cy of the PNM."

My friend Cud­joe was more con­cerned about democ­ra­cy in the PNM "and how to save the PNM" rather than the democ­ra­cy in T&T and how to save the na­tion.

Lat­er in his in­tro­duc­tion, Cud­joe did ask the ques­tion: How could we in good con­scious de­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tion to one quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion and not re­alise that at some time in the fu­ture it will come back to haunt us, par­tic­u­lar­ly Africans?"

Al­most at the end of his in­tro­duc­tion, he writes:

"Then, we may be able to say with­out boast­ing or any racial an­i­mos­i­ty, In­di­an time ah come, which is to say Trinidad and To­ba­go time has come to a place where, in the words of our na­tion­al an­them, every creed and race find an equal place."

Cud­joe seems to be say­ing equal­i­ty has ar­rived on­ly be­cause the PP has won pow­er in T&T.I wish to state that for the past few years, each month Dr Cud­joe and my­self have sat across a ta­ble at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter as a part of the Race Re­la­tions Com­mit­tee. The com­mit­tee, es­tab­lished by Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning, was a tooth­less bull­dog with­out any pow­ers or re­sources.

It was es­tab­lished by Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning to cre­ate the il­lu­sion that the PNM gov­ern­ment some­how cared about race re­la­tions in T&T while the PNM dis­crim­i­nat­ed ac­tive­ly against the In­di­an com­mu­ni­ty and all oth­ers who did not share the Man­ning world view.

n Part 2 next week

�

n Sat­narayan Ma­haraj is the

sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the

Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha

THOUGHTS

n The ti­tle may be Cud­joe's way of ad­mit­ting that at no time did In­di­ans en­joy equal­i­ty un­der a PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion.

n The PNM gov­ern­ment adopt­ed a de­lib­er­ate pol­i­cy to dis­crim­i­nate in favour of its own sup­port­ers.

n Cud­joe seems to be say­ing equal­i­ty has ar­rived on­ly be­cause the PP has won pow­er in T&T.