The Race Monster: Conclusion
The UNC's 1996 accession exposed many racial preconceptions embedded in the Creole imagination, or psyche. No riots or racial violence ensued, at least not from the masses. The PNM tribal council, however, was something else. A time-lapse montage of the period reveals much about PNM-Creole's society's racial ideas. In 1996, after Basdeo Panday's attack on the Guardian for "Chutney Rising," and Ramesh Maha-raj's media Green Paper, it was deduced by others that Indians could not understand the sophisticated white-people concept of "press freedom."
The world was told, which had suspected it all along, and took it as a symptom of the Indians' many deficiencies, like a hatred of "democracy." The specifics were detailed by Wayne Brown in the Independent between 1997-1999 in an extraordinary trove of psychological and emotional revelation about the PNM-Creole, uhm, mind. Its contents were made clear when the talk radio stations came on: Indians were "vomit," liars, thieves, drug dealers. Every day, hours a day, for 10 years.
The reliable calypsonians pitched in like (Cro Cro) telling they pardners to "Kidnap dem," and (Singing Sandra, "Genocide") that Indian doctors tied African women's tubes. All this was allowable in the name of "press freedom"-which also allowed Indian Review Committee agents into the daily press to spew Hindu fascist rage and racial contempt for Afro-Trinidadians. This was exactly what the Creole world believed all Indians were like, so (in their minds) justified talk radio's filth.
"Indian" talk radio content was a stream of bewildered rage that this was happening in daylight.
The PNM still lost the 2000 election, but when they were "let back in" by Ramesh Maharaj and others, in 2001, they mobilised their police, judicial, and media arms. The media spread the gos-pel: the UNC (Indians) were all corrupt, evil, and tiefed from "real" Trinidadians. The judiciary and police initiated lengthy, public prosecutions of the Indo Chief Justice, Sat Sharma, the Indo chief doctor, Vijay Naraynsingh, and Indo voter padders (all acquitted).
On the ground, gangs kidnapped Indians (and others). A series of articles by the present AG in the Guardian in January 2007, reported that kidnap victims were racially insulted while being raped. The race thing was out in the open, but its dynamics remain unknown since data were not collected. (Thanks UWI/PNM!) Creole society looked on silent-ly, reassured by "scholars" like Ken Ramchand and Kirk Meighoo, who insisted "it's not about race."
And this was a good indicator of Indo reaction during that decade. They took it gladly, and begged for more. Sharma and Naraynsingh did nothing after the facts of their prosecutions were revealed. Literally thousands of Indo millionaires in Trinidad who could have- as the AG did on public servants' behalf in private practice-launched judicial, economic, and other forms of pressure, instead took the government contracts and kept quiet. Why?
That hidden history again: Intra-ethnic hatred based on caste, religion, colour. A group with no higher intellectual life, no sense of community-lives built by money-lust, insecurity, puja and Bollywood. Nothing illustrates Indians' emotional infantilism like the 2000-2007 elections: Panday, like Capildeo, handing the PNM power to keep Dookeran out in 2007, as Ramesh had done to keep Panday out in 2001 and 2002.
It is this self-castration, more than any other factor, on micro and macro scales, that fuels mass Indo racism and alienation. But by 2010, the PNM had unravelled, its bedrock insanity was exposed-cf the prophetess-and consequentially, the government collapsed, elections ensued, and here we are. Also miraculously, the race thing all but disappeared from the 2010 campaign. Many questions persist as to why. But busy with Carnival and slavery, none of the people at UWI has produced any scholarship on the last decade.
My best guess is that the PNM's underclass "base" remains, but a thick margin of newly-"wired" voters shifted, not allegiance, but paradigm, for several reasons. The shock Barack Obama's election dealt to Afrocentric populism; social media creating new identities, reinscribing populist racial logic. Enough individuals acquiring the means to change identity at will changed our society in inconceivable ways.
The enigma in this new paradigm remains the Indians: an unknown quantity, a singularity.
This community is dying to be studied-their double or multiple consciousness; material achievement juxtaposed with emotional and cultural illiteracy; their dark underbelly; the Indo/Hindu worldview's negotiation with Western secularism. No study I've seen (Mobilizing India, Callaloo Nation, etc) is even aware of these issues. From the vantage of 2011, it seems that enough of the Trini body politic has retuned itself to dislodge "race" as a viable socio-cultural category, or populist trigger.
This does not mean all Trini- dadians, or even a majority, have been transformed into Utopians- the old paradigm still breathes, and can be revived. But the Nizam Mohammed irruption was both instinctive, seizing on a primal formula, and the last gasp of a dying paradigm. This series has provided an abstract of the race issue, the existing scholarship and suggested theoretical directions for further study.
I cannot stress enough the criminality of UWI "academics" in perpetuating the misunderstanding of the racial issue. Perhaps UTT will "borrow" this analysis (like they did my PhD thesis) and invite a foreign scholar to pursue it. Then we might get some answers. Phew, that was exhausting. OK, enough with the race business now.