Maha Sabha looks to an amicable relationship with Kamla

THE Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS) secretary general Vijay Maharaj is confident his organisation would have an amicable relationship with the incoming Kamla Persad-Bissessar government despite having a "dissident" on its executive and previous public disagreements.
He congratulated the UNC on its victory at the polls, wished Persad-Bissessar best wishes for her upcoming tenure and said he was willing to work with her administration.
"If Kamla Persad-Bissessar picks up the phone today and says she would like to meet, I would go and meet her. If she appears on television and do a press conference, I would have to carry it because that is part of the telecommunications authority agreement. It's not that there is any animosity or anything like that."
The duo has had public disagreements over the last few years. For instance when Maharaj said acts of desecration at temples were deliberate acts of religious hate crime. Persad-Bissessar, however, denied they were hate crimes but rather a part of escalating crime in the country.
More recently, SDMS first assistant general secretary Dinesh Rambally and then Chaguanas West MP was among five UNC MPs who raised questions over Persad-Bissessar's leadership and the party's internal election in 2024.
The others were the former MPs for Mayaro, Rushton Paray, Tabaquite, Anita Haynes-Alleyne, Naparima, Rodney Charles, and Cumuto/Manzanilla, Rai Ragbir.
Persad-Bissessar did not take kindly to this and accused them of trying to destabilise the party.
Paray and Haynes-Alleyne were not selected to recontest the seats. Charles retired from politics while Ragbir and Rambally withdrew their nominations to recontest their seats.
Rambally appeared at a PNM meeting in Sangre Grande on April 24 and endorsed Stuart Young.
Maharaj did not believe the prime minister-elect or her administration would hold Rambally's actions against the organisation.
"The fact of the matter is you're going to be dealing with about 15 or 16 ministers, if I am not mistaken. They are put in a position whereby they are going to deal with the rank and file of everybody in Trinidad and Tobago. I believe Mrs Persad-Bissessar has sufficient control over her party and over the government when she would be leading it to ensure there is equality across the board."
He added: "I don't think there is going to be any problem. I don't foresee any problem...we've lived with hostile governments in TT in the past...(and) I don't think that we're going to be with a hostile government. I think that we're going to deal with a government that's going to understand what's going on."
Maharaj said its members and executives are free to engage in politics if they wish but the SDMS remains a neutral entity. However, he said he expects that Rambally's political actions would come up in an executive meeting in two weeks. While it's not an item slated to be discussed, he expects that someone would raise it.
"There are persons who would want to talk about it, I'm sure. I know my executive. There's almost 30 plus of them. Not all of them turn up but we at least get 25 of them. There must be somebody who would bring up the talk and you do not silence these people because they are representatives of the entire country and the community. Whatever the conversation is, we have to discuss it."
Maharaj said there are mechanisms for if, though unlikely in his estimation, problems do arise. He said Rambally could decide on his own to resign from the executive and remain as an ordinary pundit or the executive could move a motion of having him expelled.
"That is what a democracy is all about."
However, he reiterated there was nothing that warranted any such moves at this time.
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"Maha Sabha looks to an amicable relationship with Kamla"