In his ar­ti­cle "Race and Na­tion­al­ism: Round 1: 1956- 1961" (Trinidad Guardian May 18) Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar wrote that "Most In­di­ans de­vel­oped strate­gies to 'get along,' but a con­se­quence of this re­sent­ment was a sep­a­ratist move­ment: the In­di­an Re­view Com­mit­tee's jaun­diced fan­ta­sy of a par­ti­tioned Trinidad-'In­desh.'"Ram­char­i­tar's state­ment is in­ac­cu­rate. The In­di­an Re­view Com­mit­tee nev­er made any call for the par­ti­tion of Trinidad, nei­ther was the group part of any sep­a­ratist move­ment. We sug­gest that Ram­char­i­tar re-ex­am­ines his sources.Fur­ther, the "In­desh is­sue" had noth­ing to do with the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM). The is­sue arose in 1990/91 with a group of Trinida­di­ans who want­ed to ob­tain res­i­den­cy sta­tus in Cana­da.

When the Cana­di­an au­thor­i­ties were in the process of de­port­ing them from Cana­da, they be­gan to ac­cuse the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) gov­ern­ment of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion against In­di­ans. They or­gan­ised them­selves in­to a Cana­di­an-based In­desh Free­dom Move­ment (IFM). Their spokesman, was quot­ed in the lo­cal press as say­ing that the call for In­desh was be­cause of "years of sup­pres­sion of ba­sic hu­man rights of the East In­di­an pop­u­la­tion in Trinidad..." They even got a Cana­di­an mem­ber of Par­lia­ment to vis­it Trinidad to ex­am­ine their claims.

The In­di­an Re­view Com­mit­tee re­ject­ed these op­por­tunis­tic po­si­tions. In an ar­ti­cle in the Sun­day Ex­press (Jan­u­ary, 20, 1991), Ka­mal Per­sad wrote that "the call for par­ti­tion of Trinidad and Guyana in or­der to found In­di­an states can­not be sup­port­ed." In fact, what we ad­vo­cat­ed was a po­si­tion of uni­fi­ca­tion: that the In­di­an-Caribbean pres­ence in coun­tries such as Guyana, Suri­name and T&T can be a fac­tor which can con­tribute to the po­lit­i­cal uni­fi­ca­tion of these states. These states, in re­al­i­ty, al­ready con­sti­tute "the In­di­an home­land" in the Caribbean, and the home­land of oth­er groups and com­mu­ni­ties who are cit­i­zens.

Ram­char­i­tar made ref­er­ence to "the In­di­ans' hid­den his­to­ry (re­turn­ing) to bite them." One is at a loss to know what this "hid­den In­di­an his­to­ry" in Trinidad is all about. Noth­ing he has writ­ten so far con­sti­tutes any grand rev­e­la­tion of this "hid­den his­to­ry." Prob­a­bly he may sup­ply us with some time­line. Did this "hid­den In­di­an his­to­ry" be­gin with In­di­an ar­rival in 1845 or is it con­fined to the black Cre­ole na­tion­al­ist era of Er­ic Williams and the PNM?As a starter he must at­tempt to be ac­cu­rate. Oth­er­wise he can be ac­cused of the very sins of the PNM in his ac­cu­sa­tions of In­di­an groups and ac­tivists.