Raphael John-Lall

The view that there is race-based vot­ing in T&T is a mere "il­lu­sion," says Dr Fuad Khan, Min­is­ter of Health and UNC MP for the Barataria/San Juan con­stituen­cy. "We do not have race-based vot­ing in T&T. We have po­lit­i­cal par­ty vot­ing. The il­lu­sion of race vot­ing comes from the fact that the large eth­nic groups his­tor­i­cal­ly sup­port ei­ther po­lit­i­cal par­ty. But race is not a huge fac­tor, it is less that five per cent," Khan told the T&T Guardian on Wednes­day.

In the 2011 Pop­u­la­tion and Hous­ing Cen­sus De­mo­graph­ic Re­port re­sults re­leased on Tues­day, the lat­est sta­tis­tics show al­most a quar­ter of T&T is racial­ly mixed, giv­ing rise to the phe­nom­e­non of T&T as a coun­try of "mi­nor­i­ty races."Ac­cord­ing to the cen­sus, 22.8 per cent or ap­prox­i­mate­ly 302,788 peo­ple in T&T are racial­ly mixed. East In­di­ans com­prise 35.4 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion while peo­ple of African de­scent form 34.2 per cent.

Of the "mixed" cat­e­go­ry, 7.7 per cent re­fer to them­selves as Dou­glas and 15.1 per cent are mixed but not In­di­an/African. All oth­er eth­nic groups to­talled 1.4 per cent while 6.2 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion did not de­clare an eth­nic­i­ty.Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) lec­tur­er and econ­o­mist Hay­den Blades said the cen­sus re­sults should now be used as a plat­form to de­ter­mine vot­ing pat­terns in the fu­ture.

"I think it helps us to move us away from this eth­ni­cal­ly based vot­ing pat­tern. It is dif­fi­cult to say. In many ways we still have a sig­nif­i­cant­ly large sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion that are sen­si­tive to race when vot­ing but the cen­sus may in fact pro­vide us with some room to spend more time dis­cussing is­sues rather than race when it comes to vot­ing," he said.

He re­mained "hope­ful" vot­ers would move away from race-based vot­ing.

"All I can do is hope that these sta­tis­tics would be the foun­da­tion of us mov­ing away from racial vot­ing," he said.Ver­non de Li­ma, mem­ber of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) and its for­mer deputy chair­man, mean­while, said it was "won­der­ful" that al­most a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion are racial­ly mixed and he be­lieves this "third force" will con­tin­ue to have a ma­jor im­pact on the po­lit­i­cal land­scape of the coun­try.

He said racial­ly mixed vot­ers have al­ways been rep­re­sent­ed in dif­fer­ent in­car­na­tions of po­lit­i­cal par­ties in the his­to­ry of the coun­try."In the last two to five elec­tions there was a trend build­ing up where by that third force of the racial­ly mix per­sons was build­ing all the time," he said."It was called ONR, the NAR in the past and nowa­days it is the COP. That third force is be­com­ing ex­treme­ly im­por­tant in any elec­tion. In a few years that 22.8 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion that is mixed would be 25 per cent."

Con­tact­ed on the mat­ter on Wednes­day, po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Dr Sel­wyn Ryan did not want to com­ment on the sub­ject at this time, as he said the mat­ter re­quires in-depth analy­sis as it is a com­plex top­ic.