A knee-jerk re­ac­tion was how for­mer prime min­is­ter Bas­deo Pan­day de­scribed this coun­try's state of emer­gency, al­most 48 hours af­ter it was en­forced. Pan­day said he was not wor­ried about the tech­ni­cal­i­ty of it, but the im­por­tance of it. "Why have it in the first place?" he asked. "What does the Gov­ern­ment want to do in a state of emer­gency that they can't do with­out it? "To ar­rest peo­ple with­out charg­ing them? "They must say what is their in­tent," Pan­day said in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day. A 15-day state of emer­gency was de­clared on Sun­day night with an eight-hour cur­few at iden­ti­fied hot spots around T&T.

Pan­day's crit­i­cisms stem from what he de­scribed as the Gov­ern­ment's "weak" ex­pla­na­tion that the call was made af­ter 11 mur­ders in 48 hours. "That just shows it was a knee-jerk re­ac­tion which was not thought out prop­er­ly...There was no need for it," he said. Pan­day, who was al­so Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter dur­ing the UNC ad­min­is­tra­tion, is of the view that the Gov­ern­ment does not have a crime plan. And if they did have one, he said, it was in­ef­fec­tive. "They don't know what they're do­ing...They are ba­si­cal­ly act­ing on im­pulse," Pan­day said. "When you look at the news at air­lines can­celling their flights and the in­ter­na­tion­al im­pli­ca­tions that such an ac­tion can have you form the opin­ion that this Gov­ern­ment is act­ing on vaps," he said.

Pan­day said that for such an ac­tion to be a suc­cess, the Gov­ern­ment should have bought the con­fi­dence of the peo­ple on this is­sue. This, he ex­plained, would have en­abled the pop­u­la­tion to work with the Gov­ern­ment to erad­i­cate the crime scourge. When it was point­ed out that the Gov­ern­ment has had the sup­port of the pop­u­la­tion, Pan­day ob­served that voic­es, such as the trade union move­ment, had been si­lenced. Fur­ther­more, peo­ple's rights had been tak­en away from them with­out them be­ing able to say any­thing about it, he said. For­mer Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter Mar­tin Joseph, who de­clined to com­ment on the present state of af­fairs in the coun­try, said sim­ply: "There are no short cuts to en­sure that you have a prop­er, func­tion­ing law en­force­ment agency."