“My wife’s fa­ther is of East In­di­an de­scent. Her name is even Kam­la and her mid­dle name is In­drani.”

This was San Fer­nan­do May­or Ju­nia Re­grel­lo’s re­sponse yes­ter­day to Pun­dit Satyanand Ma­haraj, who ac­cused him of mak­ing a “racist call” to have the Sun­dar­lal “Sun­dar Popo” Ba­ho­ra Au­di­to­ri­um at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts’ South Cam­pus in San Fer­nan­do be re­named af­ter ca­lyp­so icon Leroy “Black Stal­in” Cal­liste.

Ma­haraj yes­ter­day called on Re­grel­lo to apol­o­gise as the “In­di­an” com­mu­ni­ty felt hurt, in­sult­ed, up­set and un­set­tled by his state­ment.

How­ev­er, Re­grel­lo be­lieves Ma­haraj, like a few oth­ers, were latch­ing on to his state­ment to fu­el their own agen­da.

“My wife is mixed, I am mixed and my el­dest son is mar­ried to a woman who is half In­di­an,” Re­grel­lo said.

Re­grel­lo’s state­ment, which he made at the Hel­lo, This is the Year for Love con­cert, at the NA­PA South Cam­pus on Re­pub­lic Day, was that if he had his way the au­di­to­ri­um would not have been named in ho­n­our of Ba­ho­ra but rather Cal­liste.

He ex­plained that his pitch for the Dr Leroy Cal­liste au­di­to­ri­um was more pro­found, as Cal­liste was born in the heart of San Fer­nan­do and has rep­re­sent­ed the re­gion at every lev­el. Ba­ho­ra is a na­tive of Mon­key Town, Bar­rack­pore.

In a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day, Ma­haraj said it was up­set­ting to know that if the Re­grel­lo had his way the Sun­dar Popo name would be wiped from the cul­tur­al land­scape of T&T. He said this was a re­flec­tion of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s view of the con­tri­bu­tion by the “In­di­an” pop­u­la­tion.

“Af­ter years of be­ing ac­cused of dis­crim­i­na­tion against the In­di­an pop­u­la­tion, noth­ing seems to have changed in the par­ty that touts it­self as a na­tion­al par­ty,” Ma­haraj said.

“Lit­tle or no In­di­ans in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of HDC homes, In­di­an lec­tur­ers at UTT fired and lit­tle or no In­do-cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ties at State func­tions. The racist call of the may­or is yet an­oth­er in­ci­dent of the PNM pan­der­ing to its eth­nic base at the ex­pense of na­tion­al uni­ty, ap­pre­ci­a­tion and tol­er­ance.

“We can on­ly hope we do not have to wait for a week for an apol­o­gy, as in the case of the last PNM act of dis­crim­i­na­tion, the now in­fa­mous Sari Skit, as I now al­so call up­on the may­or to apol­o­gise for his in­sen­si­tive state­ment.”

But Re­grel­lo yes­ter­day told the Sun­day Guardian his com­ments had noth­ing to do with race and did not even men­tion that Ba­ho­ra was an In­do-Trinida­di­an.

“May I re­peat that I nev­er ad­vo­cat­ed a name change of the fa­cil­i­ty and would strong­ly rec­om­mend that the space re­mains un­der its cur­rent name. For the record, what I said was that if I was the MP for the area when it was built and the rec­om­men­da­tion from me for the name of the venue was the Dr Leroy Cal­liste Au­di­to­ri­um. I went fur­ther to say that I am cog­nizant of the tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tion made by Mr Popo but this was more pro­found than that.

“The re­al is­sue here is for prop­er recog­ni­tion to be giv­en to Stal­in be­fore it is too late. It is high time that we as a peo­ple stop see­ing all that is in front of us through the lens of eth­nic­i­ty. If they had named it af­ter Ras Kom­man­da, who is of African de­scent and from San Fer­nan­do, my views would have been the same,” Re­grel­lo said.