Deconstructing Panday
From previous and present political actions of his, Basdeo Panday is clearly a political tyrant, but, more importantly, he is a political dinosaur that refuses, with the support of all kinds of opportunistic forces, to take up his position among the fossils and in the museum. We may want to treat the tyranny as benevolent under a constitution and in a democracy that legalises it, but we know that, unchecked, it portends a terror that can be as brutal and barbaric as that which characterises military rule. As dinosaur, he hogs the tyranny in a local social context where there is an increasing personal enlightenment and independence of judgment that resents and resists it, but one where, again, there is enough personal insecurity and cultural sycophancy to give it sustenance.
The tyranny is his political way of life, so we cannot miss it. But it is most evident in his exploitation of both the democratic insufficiencies of the constitution and the large Indic appeal he enjoys.
Let's go back a bit in history to see. He took his Indo-dominated ULF constituency out of the NAR when he forced Robinson to fire him after he could not exercise the dominance he felt he should have in the wake of the 1986 elections; he killed the NAR (and, in particular, the Cabinet influence of Ken Gordon's CCN) with the move. He forced ex-NARite and independent Pam Nicholson out of his cabinet and kicked NAR's Nathaniel Moore and Agnes Williams out of the senate after Robinson had given him the government in 1995; he did so secure in the parliamentary majority provided by Vincent Lasse and Rupert Griffith, two PNM 'neemakharams' whom he had bought over. He appointed a drove of losing UNC candidates, especially the Afro ones, in the last elections as senators and some of them as junior ministers; he also appointed 'neemakharam' Griffith, one of the losers, as House Speaker.
He has had relative newcomers to the UNC, e.g., Daphne Phillips, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, and Lindsay Gillette, act as prime minister in preference to stalwarts and senior members of the party and the government. And most recently, he has not respected the results of the UNC executive elections and, in particular, has acted and spoken since those elections in usurpation of the functions of the newly elected executive as if the political leader was still lord and governor of the party and not subject to its constitution. Indeed, he has had his supporters, sycophants all, support him in these violations.
In the crisis that has engulfed his party and his government, it is instructive that the themes of his tirade against Ramesh Maharaj and company are UNC inclusion, UNC anti-corruption measures, betrayal/ingratitude/power lust/racist exclusionism/collusion with the PNM/UNC hijacking by Maharaj and company. There is no allowance whatsoever that Maharaj and company may have justifiable grievances, no concession that he may have resiled from foundational party understandings and principles, no acceptance of the charge that he has been insensitive in some of his appointments, no compromise on the position of not instituting a commission of inquiry into charges of corruption.
Instead, he sticks steadfast to the creed that he is totally right and they absolutely wrong; he is wise and they doltish; he has the ultimate power, they don't; he has the people in his back pocket, they don't.
In the face of a rending resistance at the highest levels of both his party and his government that seeks more participation, more transparency, and less domination by one man, he holds firm to the decadent reflex of maximum leadership as bestowed upon him by national constitution and ethnic sycophancy.
And yet, as surely as day follows night, that kind of leadership will fall as people become more enlightened and autonomous, as they see their world as being far larger than Caroni, Corridor, Tobago, and Trinidad and Tobago, and as communities invest themselves with more and more integrity.
Panday may argue that, where government, if not party, is concerned, he is not operating ultra vires the constitution. But even in this, he is a dinosaur, for a large majority of the public has come to see that the constitution is hostile to the way they want to be governed and can't wait to see it completely revamped. He too would have been of this mind had he not been prime minister with the vast tyrannical and corruptive powers that the post holds.
Basdeo Panday badly needs to be debriefed, but only the people in their majority can accomplish the task. Dinosaur that he is, he will plumb their credulity to the extreme to make sure that they don't. But it is already a losing proposition.
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