Chair­man of the Youth Arm of the In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty (ILP) Vir­mala Balka­ran has re­signed from the par­ty.Balka­ran al­so re­signed as a mem­ber of the in­ter­im ex­ec­u­tive of the ILP.In a let­ter di­rect­ed to par­ty leader Jack Warn­er, Balka­ran said her res­ig­na­tion was be­cause the par­ty had "lost its po­lit­i­cal glow and the nov­el­ty and ex­cite­ment has worn off."In her let­ter, she al­so high­light­ed at­tacks on oust­ed mem­ber Faaiq Mo­hammed as a ma­jor fac­tor. She de­scribed Mo­hammed's stand against the par­ty as a "con­science vote."

"He was en­ti­tled to rep­re­sent the views of the peo­ple that elect­ed him. In the same way as I was du­ty bound to rep­re­sent the views of the mem­bers of the youth arm, he was du­ty bound to rep­re­sent the views of the peo­ple. The con­dem­na­tion and hu­mil­i­a­tion for ex­press­ing a dif­fer­ent view is un­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic and con­trary to the prin­ci­ples that I thought this par­ty stood for," she said.She said she was "ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ed" that Mo­hammed had been "ter­rorised, in­tim­i­dat­ed and ha­rassed" since he vot­ed against the ILP.

She al­so said that the ILP "to the dis­may of the youth arm" start­ed re­cy­cling politi­cians."It al­so poached on the ex­ist­ing cast of UNC mem­bers. They found this to be hyp­o­crit­i­cal and im­pos­si­ble to rec­on­cile with the vi­sion of change that was orig­i­nal­ly enun­ci­at­ed. The in­clu­sion of cer­tain per­sons on the ex­ec­u­tive act­ed as a re­pel­lent and the strong con­cerns I pre­vi­ous­ly ar­tic­u­lat­ed about their front­line in­volve­ment were not giv­en due re­spect or gen­uine con­sid­er­a­tion," she said.

Balka­ran said the par­ty had been "in a state of de­cline" since both the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions and St Joseph by-elec­tion on Oc­to­ber 21 and No­vem­ber 4 re­spec­tive­ly.

"The mud-sling­ing and char­ac­ter as­sas­si­na­tion that have some­times char­ac­terised our po­lit­i­cal plat­form has over­whelmed the fo­cus on the re­al is­sues that are af­fect­ing our na­tion and in par­tic­u­lar, the youths. I have even heard youths go on our plat­forms and speak in a man­ner that was not re­spect­ful and did not re­flect well on the youth mem­ber­ship of the par­ty," she said.She said she could not iden­ti­fy with that type of pol­i­tics."It be­came a ret­ro­grade step in our pol­i­tics that takes us back­ward in­stead of for­ward," she said.