Basdeo Panday: in memoriam

JAMES MILLETTE

THE DEPARTURE lounge is at it again. This time it's Basdeo Panday, fifth prime minister of TT and first politician of Indian descent to accede to that high office. He's been patiently waiting for some time, as he himself has said, for more than 20 years beyond his biblically allotted time. Now he's gone to the gates, he's boarded the plane, and a life of ambition, achievement and accomplishment has come to an end. As the great bard once said, "now he belongs to the ages."

He's in good company, surrounded by kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, statesmen, trade unionists and individuals of many talents, by scientists, by scholars and writers, by doctors, by lawyers, by men and women of distinction, by political philosophers, and by politicians devoid of philosophies, and by an overflowing audience of ordinary people for whom he fought in his professional life and by whom he was preceded in the journey to the great beyond. He has taken the road that all must take. Death is the great leveller. It’s one of the things that makes us human.

I first met Basdeo Panday in 1965-1966, just when the honeymoon period of the post-independence era was coming to a close. He and I had recently had similar experiences and were reacting very much the same way. The Federation had failed, CLR James had come and gone and the first prime minister of TT, Dr Eric Williams, was beginning to veer ever more clearly to the support of the old colonial order, at the expense of the new.

Williams had formed a party, the People's National Movement (PNM), which had avoided a close, organic relationship with the working class. His was a “rally of all the people,” at best a mobilisation of the black intelligentsia. Time and again, Williams emphasised the point. There would be no "trade union block vote" in the PNM. The party would not associate itself with a federal labour party that included the word "socialist" in its name.

As Williams put it, the party was “neither communist, fascist, Poujadist nor messianic or Jaganist. It is a national party, deriving its inspiration from the best in democratic theory, seeking to imitate the best in democratic practice, applying to the affairs of TT the intelligence, the democratic party discipline and public morality which in the opinion of the PNM are lacking from the political life of our community...The PNM takes this opportunity of reaffirming its recent public pledge to institute legal proceedings against any person or persons seeking to defame it by alleging that it is a communist inspired movement."

Given the fact that Williams himself had spent a lot of time dodging the charge that he was communist, and many of his pre-PNM years were spent advising, and boasting about advising, trade unions and trade union leaders, this was, to say the least, a surprising statement.

In the short run, Williams was victorious and he had a handful of parliamentary victories to prove it; but the political beneficiaries of his policies were not to be found in the PNM. It was not that kind of party. Both ANR Robinson and Karl Hudson-Phillips were grafted from the PNM tree, one successfully and the other not. But they did not, on their own, possess a reliable mass following outside the PNM.

In the long run, it was Panday who reaped the rewards. Too young, and too inexperienced, even to save his deposit as a Workers and Farmers Party (WFP) candidate in 1966, he had by 1995 clearly emerged as the putative leader of a mass movement which was at one and the same time largely Indian and largely working class. I well remember Lennox Pierre saying that Panday was lucky – his race was his class. As a radical trade unionist and politician he did not have to go searching for class affiliates; they were part of his base.

In the intervening 30 years, between 1965 and 1995, he had earned his spurs as a transformative trade union leader at the expense of Bhadase Sagan Maraj and Rampartapsingh. In the 1970s, together with George Weekes, Raffique Shah, Joe Young and others, he had provided the political leadership of the United Labour Front (ULF) from which, at last – if only briefly – a reliable opposition party was soon to emerge.

Objectively, the leadership was his to take. The Oilfields Workers Trade Union (OWTU) could not provide it; for all kinds of reasons Weekes's union membership continued to follow him into the bargaining room but not into the voting booth. Shah was charismatic, but tainted by the events of 1970. Also, as he himself has stated, he was Muslim, Panday was Hindu; no contest. Young was still building the Transport and Industrial Workers Union (TIWU) which had been relatively recently formed. He had enough problems as it was.

Eventually, Panday took the party leadership, amidst a fair amount of controversy, as eventually he took the prime ministership; and he governed with a mixture of attainment and disappointment.

With leadership came the anxieties of office. He had the power; could he keep it? And if he could, at what price? Could he retain the mass support of the crowd, renting it out to organisations he did not effectively control or whose policies he did not necessarily underwrite?

This conundrum was clearly in play with the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) and the leadership of ANR Robinson, who was able to parlay two seats in Tobago and a very tenuous following in Trinidad into a prime ministership and a presidency in the waning days of a not too distinguished political career.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Panday's prime ministership was not all that it was hoped to be or, more importantly, what rank and file sugar workers would have liked it to be. At the peak of his political power, Panday was unable to save the union or the industry. True, the international sugar market had its ups and downs, but that was the history of sugar. It was an inherently unstable commodity, subject to the rise and fall of the international market.

Also, aspects of the settlement with the sugar workers, reminiscent of the “40 acres and a mule” paradigm in the post civil war period in the US, remain unfulfilled to this day.

The split in the ULF, which ultimately led to the collapse of working class unity, was probably just as important, as was the emergence of rival political organisations like the Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR) and the NAR. In short, the holy grail of the 1970s – working class unity and organisation – had been overtaken by the resurgence of disunity and disorganisation and by the marginalisation of working people in a topsy-turvy return to the politics of the early 1960s and 1970s.

Eventually, especially in the years of his prime ministership, new forces elbowed out older alternatives, including Panday himself, and the mass movement of workers became, as it had been before, a vehicle for satisfying the parliamentary ambitions of place and title seekers, uninterested in serious transformation, with meaningful repercussions on the social, economic and body politic.

And yet, in the final analysis, with all its weaknesses and liabilities, the trade union and political life of Panday will remain for a long time an important pivot in the political history of TT.

Bon voyage, Basdeo Panday. Hope to see you on the other side.

James Millette is a former general secretary of the United Labour Front, 1975-7