January 30, 2000
I f this conflict is explosive, isn't it because neither of the protagonists could have planned or anticipated the accident? A development above and beyond persons makes nonsense of our obsessions with leaders as wicked or crooked, makes it wholly immaterial whether it is President or PM who is lying; or who habitually does. Once lying is taken as a premise of action, the issue is transported from veracity and personal character to legitimacy and system properties. A matter of the public's predisposition to believe or not to believe, regardless of the facts.
Panday's problem is now therefore neither wickedness nor competence. It is the loss he inflicted on himself and the system. He'd gained legitimacy anew for both, by being the vehicle for the rise to office, long overdue, of Indians, meaning half of the country, whatever their number. The PM is in some ways also victim. His Trinidad is the extreme case of that centralism which is the hallmark of West India-not only because the Executive is a committee of the Legislature but because the complex cleavages which tribalise the political community also make Doctor Politics the most natural mode of governance. In every little panside.
The pervasive nature of ethnic community and of maximum leadership also implies a multitude of fertile frontiers on which ethnic separateness is perpetually under assault by the new culture of the creole and the dougla. Changing roles and identities-mas, if you like- are the order of the day. Carnival is the central rite and festival. Even for those who oppose it, it is the key indicator. It puts on show our state of integration, the extent to which our cultural and artistic creations are extensions of our persons.
Despite our reluctancy, through this constant projection, we find ourselves becoming like one another. Insensibly and absurdly in many different ways. And yet democratically and without violence; without any engineering by fundamentalists or politicians. The upshot is that ethnic fundamentalism and primal solidarity are dying both. Among the new generations, race, class, colour, religion and island-homeland are retreating as valid bases for either political affiliation or personal choices.
It is the reason ethnicity is kicking. Never have we heard so much about Tobago, Indians, Africans, Syrians and French Creoles. T&T is growing up. We've been freed to advance to maturity. More and more we are our own First World. Have Indians not at last come to office by democratic process? Have not Tobagonians got a great deal more home rule, even if, with clearer thinking, there remains much tidying up to be done in regard to the institutional and constitutional framework?
Of course the old culture of governance has in many ways persisted. Habits of spending are much like they were, when Afro-Saxons ruled and orders came routinely from Port of Spain to Scarborough. Indians and Tobagonians are proving themselves to themselves and to everybody else, true Trinbagonians and West Indians. The old order is doomed. This is the happy accident now overwhelming Panday's UNC. Brought it on themselves. Their typically West Indian inferiority complex made them hesitant and insincere about national unity and parasitic oligarchy (concepts borrowed in 1981 from a Tapia analysis of citizens who all regarded themselves as second class but admitted no first or third-probably because they are happy confounding second class with middle class).
This is also an accident that is no accident at all. It was bound to happen. A matter of time. What it puts at issue is the West Indian political system which hears only the Voice of One, ritually leaves our people out, and therefore systematically underperforms and underfulfills. The threat of this accident is not that it promises violence but that it exhibits the alternative. To the extent that the politics of the resolution cannot but educate the public to the ineluctable need to choose-between politics and violence.
Over these last days, we've made a big leap. From experience with this standoff, we've perhaps guessed what Panday has in common not only with Williams and Robinson, but also with Burnham, Manley and Seaga, the Birds, Compton, Castro, Munoz, Balaguer, Aristide, Toussaint, and the whole of the pantheon, including Eyre and Picton. These all have their merits but stand in a tradition we are poised now to repudiate and reject.
In some ways out of political convenience, the President is dealing mainly with symptoms which bear on the integrity of the State. However, Robinson is undoubtedly Messenger and absolutely fissionable in the role. We've seen him on the brink before, with Panday in 1987-88, and with the Imam in 1990. We are seeing him on the brink again now, with those two adversaries once more in the picture, some say together.
For his part, Panday finds himself ludicrously and exactly where Manning stood in 1995, the inception of his madness. Even if there is crisis of parliament, government and Constitution, the decisive consideration is if Panday can persuade anyone, anywhere, that it is the stubbornness of the President which takes the crisis to its source. Will he now ask the President to declare a state of emergency?
Once the public becomes clear on the answer, it is academic which of the protagonists moves to make a provisional settlement-until the politics is plays and not only on elections. Polls there will be, later if not sooner. Mobilisation is already in process, aligning the forces in a whole new way.
Manning's PNM and Panday's UNC fall together in the camp of authoritarian, primal and constitutionalist politics. But Panday at least will see that None of the Above is now the most fertile constituency, calling for open politics and dougla politics as the new dispensation.
We might well be surprised. In the time available, a second force is entirely feasible. And yet, how can we see a country growing up and coming to active political participation and not expect, hope even, that, if the ethnic parties cannot beat creolisation, they might very well join it?