Gail Alexan­der

At­tor­ney Lar­ry Lal­la has joined calls by sev­er­al UNC mem­bers and for­mer front­lin­ers for UNC leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to re­sign.

He made the re­marks on Wednes­day.

For­mer UNC MP Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan said Tues­day he felt Lal­la should be­come a UNC Sen­a­tor. Lal­la act­ed in the Sen­ate dur­ing the last term. Per­sad-Bisses­sar was ap­point­ed Op­po­si­tion leader on Tues­day. Lal­la in his state­ment, said: “In the leader’s con­ces­sion speech, she said three very im­por­tant things: that she ac­cept­ed full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the loss, that this is the twi­light of her po­lit­i­cal ca­reer and that the UNC is in a pe­ri­od of tran­si­tion.”

“Hav­ing ac­cept­ed the post of Op­po­si­tion Leader and hav­ing said ‘the come­back is nor­mal­ly greater than the set­back’, she now seems to be reneg­ing on the words of com­fort which she gave and which were wel­comed by par­ty mem­bers and the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty. For the sake of my par­ty and our coun­try I hope she’s not reneg­ing,” he said.

“When peo­ple in an or­gan­i­sa­tion do what we con­sid­er to be right, it is im­por­tant for the or­gan­i­sa­tion and for our own well-be­ing, to give sup­port. Some­times do­ing so may tem­porar­i­ly make you un­pop­u­lar or may earn you tem­po­rary foes. But at the end of the day, in this short life that we have, we must try to do right, even when do­ing so may be dif­fi­cult.”

“To­day I add my voice to those of Dr Fuad Khan, Vas­ant Bharath, De­vant Ma­haraj, Vashist Ma­haraj, Kelvin Ramkissoon, Lester Orie and many oth­ers and say the time has come for Mrs Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar SC to grace­ful­ly fol­low the ex­am­ple set by Dr Tim Gopeesingh and to step away from lead­er­ship of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress.”

Ma­haraj and Ramkissoon are al­so at­tor­neys.

Lal­la added: “Af­ter two suc­ces­sive gen­er­al elec­tion de­feats and many oth­ers on ei­ther side of those, the time has long past for there to be a change of lead­er­ship and di­rec­tion in the par­ty.”

“A po­lit­i­cal leader of a par­ty must al­ways be a trustee of her or his par­ty and must al­ways put the in­ter­ests of the par­ty, its mem­bers and the coun­try above self and self-in­ter­ests. I re­main com­mit­ted, as I al­ways have, to serv­ing the par­ty in any way it sees fit.”

Ma­haraj and Khan whose com­ments Per­sad-Bisses­sar on Tues­day dis­missed, al­so replied to her com­ments.

Ma­haraj said she used a charm-of­fen­sive which, how­ev­er, didn’t fool peo­ple who want­ed sub­stance.

Orie, in his lat­est com­men­tary on the UNC lead­er­ship is­sue, stat­ed: “One hopes the ab­bre­vi­at­ed skirt lengths of Kam­la and Ani­ta (Haynes) at (yes­ter­day’s) swear­ing-in were not sar­to­r­i­al state­ments made to im­press the fash­ion­istas that they were hip and chic but that they were sym­bol­ic of the longevi­ty of their stay as faces and voic­es of the UNC.”

Among his points he knocked UNC’s can­di­date choic­es: “The most im­por­tant ques­tion to be asked of a prospec­tive can­di­date is how have you dis­tin­guished your­self in the con­text of Trinidad or if not na­tion­al­ly, how so in your re­gion, in your field of en­deav­our–as a schol­ar or bene­fac­tor?

“To pick a can­di­date be­cause one is a par­ty hack, a syco­phant, a friend or fam­i­ly, or be­cause of some such rea­son of nepo­tism or favouritism isn’t ac­cept­able and is a recipe for de­feat–as hap­pened re­cent­ly.”

UNC of­fi­cials on Wednes­day dis­missed com­ments by Ma­haraj and Khan say­ing they were not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of par­ty mem­bers.