Gail Alexan­der

UNC deputy chair­man Dr Fuad Khan is ex­press­ing the hope the cau­cus formed by UNC back­bench MPs is not meant to "fur­ther di­vide" the UNC to al­low the rul­ing PNM an­oth­er term in of­fice. This forms part of Khan's re­sponse re­gard­ing Thurs­day's move by the three back­bench MPs–Kelvin Ram­nath, for­mer UNC leader Bas­deo Pan­day and Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj–to form a cau­cus. Khan said: "It is un­for­tu­nate the MPs are not com­ing to the UNC's cau­cus to which they were in­vit­ed nu­mer­ous times. It's their right to at­tend as MPs. It is sad to see they have cho­sen to have their own cau­cus and act as a dif­fer­ent arm of the UNC.

"We still hope that good sense will pre­vail and they will come to the UNC cau­cus and form one unit to fight the PNM which was the wish of the UNC elec­torate in in­ter­nal elec­tions and I do hope they are not seek­ing to di­vide the par­ty fur­ther to al­low Man­ning an­oth­er term in of­fice." Khan added, "It is un­for­tu­nate three sea­soned politi­cians have cho­sen not to work with the wish­es of the UNC mem­bers who vot­ed in a new po­lit­i­cal do­min­ion which is nec­es­sary to re­move the PNM." Yes­ter­day, back­bench MP Ram­nath said, Thurs­day's meet­ing of about 30 peo­ple in­clud­ed MP Mick­ela Pan­day, for­mer Sen­a­tor Sharon Gopaul-Mc­Ni­chol, Cou­va North and South ac­tivists and peo­ple who were on the MPs slates for the re­cent in­ter­nal elec­tions.

Ram­nath said MPs Vas­ant Bharath and Hamza Rafeeq were in­vit­ed but did not at­tend since they were both over­seas. Rafeeq is still re­cu­per­at­ing from re­cent ill­ness, Ram­nath added. Ram­nath said the group in­tends to con­tin­ue meet­ing every two weeks and keep ex­pand­ing to en­sure "the par­ty doesn't run away with a few op­por­tunists," he added. He said the group will in­vite rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all con­stituen­cies "To pre­serve and pro­tect democ­ra­cy in UNC and en­sure the par­ty doesn't de­vi­ate from its moor­ings of so­cial jus­tice and re­spect for the peo­ple who built the par­ty," he said. Asked whether it might be the start of an­oth­er par­ty, Ram­nath said, "All things are pos­si­ble but it de­pends on what they (in UNC) will be do­ing. A lot of the peo­ple there now came from the bow­els of the NAR and we who laboured to build the UNC would not want to see the UNC end up like the NAR.

"We have no prob­lems hav­ing Sen­a­tors from the NAR or so but we should al­so have a group that mon­i­tors the sys­tem there now. "It's too ear­ly to say where this will go. But we won't roll over and die and we don't plan leav­ing the par­ty we built." Asked if their ac­tion as an ap­par­ent par­al­lel group would not hurt the par­ty they built, Ram­nath said, "I 'm not wor­ried about who suf­fers from para­noia. We have the free­dom of the Con­sti­tu­tion to meet and dis­cuss mat­ters con­cern­ing the par­ty we found­ed and we re­tain the right to mon­i­tor ac­tiv­i­ties and com­ment on it."