It isn’t too much to ask, in a na­tion as di­verse as ours, that when an elec­tion date is an­nounced and po­lit­i­cal cam­paign­ing shifts in­to high gear, par­ties and can­di­dates should take ex­tra spe­cial care to avoid race-bait­ing and stereo­typ­ing.

Un­less there can be a healthy and open di­a­logue on the is­sue, race needs to be ex­punged from T&T’s body politic and pub­lic dis­course.

It may not be the most at­trac­tive vote-get­ting strat­e­gy, but with all that is at stake in this in­creas­ing­ly po­larised so­ci­ety, politi­cians who are tru­ly se­ri­ous about build­ing a stronger na­tion should make more of an ef­fort to bridge the coun­try’s eth­nic and cul­tur­al di­vide.

Al­ready, there are ear­ly warn­ing signs that the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign could be head­ed down the trib­al route.

It is a shame that 35 years af­ter it was stat­ed by the Hy­atali Com­mis­sion, T&T still “presents to the out­side world a pic­ture of racial har­mo­ny, but there ex­ists, nonethe­less, be­neath the sur­face, smoul­der­ing em­bers of racial and eth­nic fric­tion.”

This is a sad re­flec­tion on the state of the largest eth­ni­cal­ly di­verse pop­u­la­tion in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean.

In­deed, we find our­selves al­ready wit­ness­ing un­for­tu­nate ex­changes, fu­elled by al­le­ga­tions of race, be­tween Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s in­sin­u­a­tion that the on­go­ing Es­tate Man­age­ment and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (EM­BD) car­tel law­suit was part of a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) racial smear cam­paign against the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) was bad enough but Dr Row­ley’s re­sponse a few days lat­er didn’t help.

Both on­ly re­in­forced the ex­tent to which any sem­blance of peace­ful co­ex­is­tence in this na­tion is dis­pelled when pol­i­tics comes in­to play.

That has been the un­for­tu­nate re­al­i­ty in T&T pol­i­tics from as far back as the 1950s, and has de­fined the type of en­gage­ments that have oc­curred be­tween the PNM and the fore­run­ner to the UNC, the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Labour Par­ty (DLP), since then.

This is still the state of pol­i­tics in a na­tion with a Con­sti­tu­tion that sets out the right of cit­i­zens to live with­out dis­crim­i­na­tion on grounds of “race, ori­gin, colour, re­li­gion or sex.”

In T&T’s his­to­ry, there has been on­ly one very fleet­ing pe­ri­od in the mid-1980s when the now-de­funct Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) man­aged to unite Afro- and In­do-Trin­bag­o­ni­ans un­der one po­lit­i­cal ban­ner.

How­ev­er, it didn’t take long for rifts to de­vel­op along the usu­al trib­al lines. That re­mains the chal­lenge to this day, even as dis­parate po­lit­i­cal par­ties try again and again to form al­liances and ac­com­mo­da­tions.

The spec­tre of race, al­ways lurk­ing in the back­ground, makes these arrange­ments dif­fi­cult to sus­tain.

It might be use­ful, in any se­ri­ous ef­fort to erad­i­cate race from T&T pol­i­tics, to recom­mit to the Coun­cil for Re­spon­si­ble Po­lit­i­cal Be­hav­iour and the Code of Eth­i­cal Po­lit­i­cal Con­duct, which the UNC with­drew from re­cent­ly.

The coun­cil sets stan­dards of po­lit­i­cal be­hav­iour that are as rel­e­vant and nec­es­sary as ever, as the coun­try en­ters in­to what is like­ly to be an in­tense cam­paign sea­son.

In pur­suit of re­al uni­ty, every par­ty that as­pires to gov­ern this coun­try should con­form to its stan­dards.

For a change, let this be an elec­tion free of dis­crim­i­na­tion on the ba­sis of race and all the oth­er things that di­vide us.