By Stephen Kangal
January 24, 2007

Self styled and pathological struggler, Mr. Basdeo Panday who enjoys the unique distinction of having mashed up each and every recent experiment in electoral-based accommodation is again erecting another ego-centric unity platform carded for 25 January. As usual, unity, whatever that means is to be found in the mind of Panday, must be crafted under his skewed leadership and on his egocentric driven terms and conditions.

Why is unity not being contracted under the more credible, enlightened and acceptable leadership of The Honourable Winston Dookeran of the COP as well as with an agreed strategic agenda for wresting governance from the PNM in 2007?

Panday knows that his dwindling, demoralised and disenchanted rural support base has now matured politically and is deserting him in droves. They now rarely subscribe to the guru-chela paradigm of local Indian politics under which Panday prospered. They have also reached saturation point with his shenanigans, his antics and his charade of the politics of convenience that are geared exclusively to achieving temporary removal of the PNM from Government.

What are the policies, programmes and priorities for achieving effective governance, sustainable unity and cohesiveness post- PNM removal? Panday has none and we must expect none. He exulted with sadistic delight over the demise of the ONE LOVE of the NAR in1991 that he singularly engineered.

Is this not the same chameleon Panday who deceptively tenanted the UNC leadership to Mr.Winston Dookeran in October 2005? Thereafter he immediately embarked upon the most disgraceful, vicious and cunning subterfuge with the aid of the cabal to humiliate and drive Dookeran from the leadership of the UNC? Accordingly his clarion call for his pet subject “unity” is another medium for promoting his big ego-trip that must now be considered as a mere hallucination of this Joker of Palmiste ( El Burlador de Palmiste).

Panday wants keep us in a state of political indentureship so that he can continue to exploit and abuse us politically.

Which serious group of politicians today, except the morally, ethically and the politically bankrupt and challenged will want to treat seriously with and arrive at a tenuous accommodation with a convicted felon who is facing further allegations of criminal impropriety? Do those who now support Panday have any standard of morality or sensibility left in them?

Having failed to use and abuse Dookeran to sanitise and salvage his scarred political image Panday now wants to use minor party leaders, under the guise and lure of unity, to decriminalise and endorse his sullied character. That was the lion who feigned fatal illness and got his doctors to back him up to avoid enjoying the hospitality of the State at Golden Grove. His agenda is not about advancing the cause of parliamentary politics nor of Westminster etiquette. His unity agenda is about him and him only.

Panday has zero political credibility left. Genuine unity must be contracted on the pursuit of mutually agreed political goals and the purgation of the ego factor. Panday cannot and will not rid himself of his limitless and insatiable apetite for swirling in public adulation by proxy even if T&T and his own followers are disadvantaged in the process.

Unfortunately there is still left in T&T a remnant handful of “chelas” and sycophants who he has hitherto conditioned to pay eternal homage to a discredited “guru” in the elusive and vain hope that he would deliver the “channa amrit” or the promised land to a few of the former Caroni workers.

Panday is still capable of and singularly bent on inflicting enormous damage to the body politic in 2007. Let us hope that the prescriptions of karmic justice will be administered through the courts on our compelling and collective behalf to save us from the further punishment to be derived from the impending post-elections Armageddon should the PNM prevail and win a three-fourth majority to create the Executive President.

Panday is hell bent on splitting hairs on non- issues as well as votes to keep Winston out of Whitehall. After all Panday wants to defend his divine and inalienable right and reputation to be the only Indo-Trinbagonian suitable enough to have occupied Whitehall at the beginning of the 21st Century and to have planted the Shiva Lingam and a jhandi in The Prime Minister’s Residence in St. Ann’s Gardens.