Playing into their hands

CLEARLY elections are in the air. Our politicians regularly spar over a range of issues, but in recent weeks they have been at each other’s throats with an animosity for which it is hard to find precedent.

Parties are calling each other paedophiles.

There is no agreement on how crime is to be addressed. No one sees eye to eye on how best to diversify the economy or bolster food production, with wars looming. The climate crisis looms too, but you can hardly tell.

The Privy Council remains this country’s highest court of appeal, even as its jurisprudence serves up increasingly odious implications for human rights, and there is no sign of its being abolished.

Tragedies such as the deaths of workers at state facilities, and travesties such as the breakdown of official protection of abused women fail to inspire common ground among leaders. Instead, tit-for-tat squabbling is running the nation.

So the call made this earlier month by historian and former politician Prof Brinsley Samaroo for the country to put aside its “inter-ethnic antagonism” is a timely one which we urge all to take note of.

Speaking at the launch of a new book, Adrian Cola Rienzi – The Life and Times of an Indo-Caribbean Progressive, which examines a moment in history during the 1930s when the two major races here came together to fight oppression by the British empire, Prof Samaroo traced the current divisions to Britain’s cleverly devised policy of divide and rule, implemented the world over.

“We are being used as gamecocks that have nothing against each other but fight each other,” he said at the event held at Naparima College.

“It is a philosophy the British created to keep us in subjection. We were taught to do that by a regime that saw that as their only way of survival.”

The historian said the narrative that blames the late Dr Eric Williams and Dr Rudranath Capildeo for the continuing polarisation should stop, and called for re-socialisation, re-education, and constitutional reform “to virtually compel the two ethnicities to come together and work in a new political arrangement.”

We strongly urge politicians to take note of Prof Samaroo’s call.

But we are mindful that getting politicians to put aside counter-productive divisions and their culture of toxic invective is easier said than done.

Perhaps the key to this lies in the very people whom the politicians govern rejecting blind loyalty and demanding greater accountability, from both those who govern and those who hold the governors to account.

And perhaps more people need to speak up, the way Prof Samaroo admirably has.