The beauty of Basdeo

The Editor, Madam:

History is nothing if not ironic. Things turn out the opposite of what the logical mind expects. In history, opposites occur. And paradoxes, too.

Our race-based system of party politics has always been savagely critiqued. I have called our race-based politics a disease. An evil stalking the heart of our land. It is fundamentally tribal, undemocratic, based on our most primitive instincts.

But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the genius of the people, the Volkgeist ( volks – people, geist – genius/spirit) has collectively decided otherwise. The collective unconscious of our folk has ruled: you take a hand, and I take a hand, not together, but consecutively; you go, then I go. One race-based party in power, then the next, taking turns. A kind of revolving-door pluralism at this point in our constitutional history.

And if you muck up very badly, then you will sit two turns out, or even three. And, as if to prove the point, coalitions have always ended badly.

Basdeo Panday ended an era in Trinidad and Tobago politics. He, above anyone else, by his own sacrifices and indomitability, ended the era of the one-horse PNM [People’s National Movement] party race. He achieved this in four Panday-esque steps. First, his feisty emergence in the trade union movement; second, his parliamentary and political battles with the PNM; third, his alliance with the NAR [National Alliance for Reconstruction] and A.N.R. Robinson; and, fourth, his ascension to the prime ministership in 1995. He established the legitimacy of the East Indian in political authority. No one may any longer claim that an East Indian majority cabinet looks perversely Pakistani.

I first met Panday when I was a boy, just out of college. I had gone to parliament, the Red House, to see what it was all about. I entered the washroom and there was he, Panday, zipping up, walking out. Caught unawares, he joked. Warmly, generously, disarmingly, “Eh eh, like meh zip stick, boy.”

The opposition party was 10 out of 36. And boy, how the PNM members made fun of them! They were made sport of. Their earnest and adamant contributions were cast aside unceremoniously. The PNM held the overwhelming majority, and poor Panday and his ULF colleagues appeared to be spinning top in mud, poor-me-one, desolate and pathetic. No hope.

But in the washroom, I had witnessed Panday close up. His face. It was the face of the undefeated, indefatigable flag. He had been hustling to get back into the parliamentary broil. I could see, marked on this face, no fear. No timidity. No symptom of cowardice. But a warrior’s delight, excitement, impatience, to get back into the gayelle and fight.

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH