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Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Bharath confirms he will challenge Kamla

by

Peter Christopher
1764 days ago
20201027
Former UNC government minister Vasant Bharath.

Former UNC government minister Vasant Bharath.

Vas­ant Bharath will con­test the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress In­ter­nal elec­tions.

The for­mer Min­is­ter of Trade con­firmed he threw his hat in the ring, as he be­lieved the par­ty re­quired rad­i­cal changes af­ter a string of loss­es in na­tion­al elec­tions.

“My faith in the UNC as a par­ty is still very whole, it is still very to­tal, it is un­ques­tion­able. And the re­al­i­ty is that I have no in­ten­tions of sit­ting idly by as a spec­ta­tor and con­tin­ue to watch its fur­ther de­struc­tion and bill it so the an­swer to you ques­tion is yes I in­tend to run,” said Bharath dur­ing a ra­dio show yes­ter­day.

He added, “I in­tend to put up and work with a high­ly re­spect­ed and com­mit­ted team for the elec­tion on De­cem­ber 6. I am hope­ful that we can con­vince the mem­ber­ship of the par­ty that it needs to change, it needs to change rad­i­cal­ly, it needs to start at­tract­ing peo­ple out­side of its base.”

On Mon­day evening dur­ing the UNC’s Vir­tu­al Re­port, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar con­firmed that the polls would be held on De­cem­ber 6, af­ter sev­er­al calls from some of her de­trac­tors that elec­tions should be held.

She had re­spond­ed to many of those de­trac­tors last week, stat­ing that they did not re­spect the UNC mem­ber­ship and had on­ly viewed the par­ty as a means to as­cend to pow­er.

One of the most vo­cal crit­ics De­vant Ma­haraj, who had paid for sev­er­al bill­boards call­ing for the Siparia MP to step down, had pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed his in­ten­tion to con­test the elec­tion.

Bharath said yes­ter­day, that the par­ty need­ed to be more in­clu­sive in spite of dis­sent­ing voic­es with­in.

“I think the first and most im­por­tant pri­or­i­ty for the par­ty is to unite the peo­ple of the coun­try, unite all of those mem­bers who have been cast aside for friv­o­lous rea­sons. There has been no dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion brought against them as far as I am aware so the first thing is to unite those voic­es who have val­ue to bring to the or­ga­ni­za­tion you know and they are many of them out­side, we even saw in the last gen­er­al elec­tion many peo­ple who of­fered them­selves were not ac­cept­ed,” he said, point­ing to ex­pe­ri­enced mem­bers who ap­peared to be side­lined.

“Peo­ple like Fazal Karim, peo­ple like Bhoe Tewarie, peo­ple like Ra­mona Ram­di­al, Lar­ry Lal­la for ex­am­ple, Kevin Ram­nar­ine, Fuad Khan. All of these peo­ple were ac­tu­al­ly re­ject­ed for no good rea­son that has been ad­vanced by the par­ty nor the po­lit­i­cal leader. There are oth­ers on the out­side as well, peo­ple like Mick­ela Pan­day and Mr Pan­day him­self who have been forced to form, in the case of Mick­ela, to form her own or­gan­i­sa­tion be­cause of her frus­tra­tions with the par­ty,” the for­mer Min­is­ter said.

Mean­while, Po­lit­i­cal An­a­lyst Dr Win­ford James said it was pre­ma­ture to say if Bharath had enough sup­port to sup­plant Per­sad-Bisses­sar as the po­lit­i­cal leader, even though he had been spo­ken off bright­ly as an al­ter­na­tive to Per­sad-Bisses­sar.

Dr James said while there was the point of view that the Siparia MP should step down be­cause of the UNC’s suc­ces­sive elec­tions, Per­sad-Bisses­sar still com­mands sig­nif­i­cant sup­port from grass­roots mem­ber­ship and work­ing-class women.

Bharath opt­ed out of the 2017 in­ter­nal elec­tion, af­ter be­ing trounced in the 2015 in­ter­nal elec­tion which Per­sad-Bisses­sar won by al­most 15,000 votes.


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