Re: the In­di­an Re­view Com­mit­tee's let­ter of June 22, in re­sponse to my ar­ti­cle of May 18: In writ­ing the race se­ries I had to com­press an enor­mous amount of in­for­ma­tion in­to 900-word in­stall­ments. Per­haps the In­di­an Re­view Com­mit­tee did not use the word "In­desh," but their de­sire for sep­a­ratism, and the di­rect re­la­tion of their par­tic­u­lar "call" to the In­desh pro­pos­al, is in­con­testable. My source was the IRC-pub­lished book, HP Singh, The In­di­an Strug­gle for Jus­tice and Equal­i­ty Against Black Racism in Trinidad and To­ba­go, 1956-1962.

On pp 115-121 the is­sue of The Cre­ation of an In­di­an Home­land in the Amer­i­c­as is dis­cussed. The first ar­ti­cle speaks of "the 1960s yearn­ing for an In­di­an home­land" named "In­dus­tan." Columns by Ka­mal Per­sad pub­lished in the Ex­press, in­clud­ing the one on Jan­u­ary 20, 1991, were al­so pub­lished in this sec­tion. In that ar­ti­cle, Per­sad vis­its HP Singh's calls for par­ti­tion of Trinidad. He pro­pos­es that it could not be sup­port­ed, but called for the "uni­fi­ca­tion of the South Amer­i­can states of Guyana, Suri­name and Trinidad as one state, and that this state be the In­di­an home­land in the Amer­i­c­as."

The IRC's pro­pos­al de­vel­ops and is more am­bi­tious than Singh's par­ti­tion, and takes the jaun­diced fan­ta­sy to the realms of the ab­surd. Fur­ther­more, the IRC's let­ter on June 22 at­tempts to in­ject a lev­el­ness that was not present in the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle, with talk of in­clud­ing "oth­er groups and com­mu­ni­ties who are cit­i­zens." How­ev­er, the da­ta sup­port the con­tention that the IRC's po­si­tion and Singh's are func­tion­al­ly iden­ti­cal. Both are sep­a­ratist. Singh ex­plic­it­ly calls for par­ti­tion. The IRC de­vel­ops this idea in­to a call for an In­di­an home­land con­sist­ing of three sep­a­rate, in­de­pen­dent states, which are pop­u­lat­ed by mul­ti­ple eth­nic groups and so is en­tire­ly, ir­rev­o­ca­bly, im­pos­si­ble. How­ev­er, I ad­mit that the IRC did not di­rect­ly use the word "In­desh"-they used the word "In­dus­tan." As for their con­fu­sion about "hid­den his­to­ry"-if you read ar­ti­cles look­ing for the bits that you want to find, and ig­nore the rest, you're go­ing to have that prob­lem. They can read my the­sis, lodged at the UWI.

Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

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