Sat Ma­haraj

On June 13, 17 for­mer Per­ma­nent Sec­re­taries caused to be pub­lished, via let­ters to the ed­i­tor of the dai­ly news­pa­pers, their re­sponse to state­ments which I made at the re­cent In­di­an Ar­rival Day cel­e­bra­tions.It would ap­pear that they did not have the ben­e­fit of read­ing my last ar­ti­cle, pub­lished June 12, which com­pre­hen­sive­ly tears apart their pur­port­ed ar­gu­ments.

I wish to quote Mr Ken­neth R Lal­la, CMT, SC, who is a promi­nent lawyer and for­mer chair­man of the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, the De­fence Force Com­mis­sions Board and the Ju­di­cial and Le­gal Ser­vice Com­mis­sion.

Premised on his ex­pe­ri­ence and re­search, he stat­ed in­ter alia in his au­thor­i­ta­tive text on The Pub­lic Ser­vice and Ser­vice Com­mis­sions that: "Al­le­ga­tions of bi­as­es and par­tial­ly of civ­il ser­vants have been ev­i­dent pri­or and sub­se­quent to the ad­vent of the In­de­pen­dence of T&T and they have not been de­void of sub­stance. The pop­u­la­tion of T&T is com­prised of two ma­jor eth­nic groups.

"Afro-Trinida­di­an and In­do-Trinida­di­an, the two ma­jor groups have been po­larised po­lit­i­cal­ly, both be­fore and af­ter po­lit­i­cal In­de­pen­dence of the coun­try. More­over, one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Civ­il Ser­vice is that it has been and still is staffed pre­dom­i­nant­ly by Afro-Trinida­di­ans. In­deed, the po­lit­i­cal are­na had al­ways been dom­i­nat­ed by two po­lit­i­cal par­ties–the PNM sup­port­ed large­ly by Afro-Trinida­di­ans and PDP, sub­se­quent­ly re­placed by the DLP, then the ULF, all sup­port­ed large­ly by In­do-Trinida­di­ans.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers