The Cunning of the Silver Fox: The Caribbean After Basdeo Panday
At this moment of danger in the Caribbean, many want the truth to be told about the late Basdeo Panday, the first Indo-Trinidadian and Hindu prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Far more than we realize, this is a difficult task at a moment of national honors and military salutes.
Many tell us that the “Silver Fox,” Panday, had two faces. Yet, we cannot accept this portrait uncritically. We must be alert to the social motion and debates often found behind storied personalities who wear and discard masks in the Carnival of official politics.
Some regard Panday, the founder and inaugural political leader of the United National Congress (UNC) as an accomplished public servant guided by principles of national unity, multi-racial co-operation, and the dignity of Caribbean labour. Few have dared to tell us why, beyond rehearsing a professional resumé that almost any Caribbean parent would adore, how he contributed to the rebirth of society. Panday, in his capacity as politician and trade union bureaucrat, was not unique. Many Caribbean parliamentarians and statesmen began their careers as trade unionists before assuming roles as managers of labour and partners of multinational capital. The fact of his origins in organised labour by itself means nothing. We must reason the content of his life in labour and politics.
Standard bearers of “progressive” parties and movements salute Basdeo Panday, for his “great legacy,” even as other voices fight to be heard as they underscore that he was corrupt and racist, a betrayer of labour, and an ordinary neo-colonial politician. Others chart a third way by declaring that Panday was once an opponent of the “parasitic oligarchy” but left this commitment behind in his later alignment with the wealthiest classes of Caribbean financiers.
But did Panday in fact have two faces? How can we reconcile the man who at once is remembered as a prophet of national unity and an ethnic chauvinist, a champion of labour and friend of capital, a charismatic man of the people and a demure statesman?
Two Faces or Two Masks?
Clash! does not accept the terms of this paradoxical legacy at face value. We aspire to a higher synthesis. There may be conflicting tendencies within the historical personality of Basdeo Panday. But they are not his to bear alone. They index recurring tensions in Caribbean history and politics. The past and coming days are not a moment to simply litigate which of the two faces captured Panday’s true essence or character. Rather, the present is a moment of urgency where we must fight to clarify our collective memory in search of the clashes still to come.
The young Basdeo Panday was an actor and singer. Born in deep south Trinidad and educated in Britain, he became a lawyer, economist, labour leader, and politician. He served as a legal advisor to the Oilfield Workers Trade Union from 1956–1957 and contested parliamentary elections in 1966 as a candidate for Stephen Maharaj’s and CLR James’ Workers and Farmers Party.
Panday’s contributions to two organisations with a perceived Afro-Creole bent laid the foundation for the first face of his mythical personality as a cultivator of a multiracial working class. Panday parlayed this organising experience into a leadership post as President General of the All Trinidad Sugar & General Workers Union in 1973 where he collaborated with George Weekes’ Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU), heeding the calls for African-Indian Unity that sprang from the Black Power Revolution of 1970.
Raffique Shah — a principal actor in this saga himself — is quick to underscore that “Basdeo Panday did not invent ‘racial unity’, nor was he the first political leader to embrace people of another race within his ranks.” Shah invokes the memory of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association, Uriah Butler’s Home Rule Movement, and George Weekes’ OWTU as earlier grounds of multiracial working class unity shrouded behind the popular image of Panday as a maverick unifier.
Shah also recounts Panday’s vexed entry into the sugar belt. In 1973, workers at Orange Grove factory went on strike in protest of two estate managers, Tello and Hunt. In this episode of workers’ self-organisation independent of union leadership, the workers sought out Shah as a well known veteran of the military regiment that mutinied against Eric Williams and the PNM during the Black Power uprising of 1970. Notably, too, Shah was derisively labeled a “creolized” Indian due to his popularity with the Afro-Creole working people of the East-West Corridor and the Indian working people of the sugar belt alike.
Panday took the reins of the All Trinidad Union to curb the influence of Shah as a cultivator of the popular will. Panday was a more acceptable alternative. He was comfortable in his exchanges with elite Afro-Saxon political leaders, but lacked the “creolized” disposition of Shah. Panday understood this well. He would later remark that Eric Williams “did not mind the sugar workers having an Indian leader who would carry on as an Indian leader.”
Panday equivocated in this role as an acceptable mouthpiece of the Indian working class in Trinidad. As workers forged ahead with “no-cut” strikes on the sugar estates, Panday nominally supported them. As he trailed the workers, his popularity with them grew. But in the final instance, Panday sided with management over the workers themselves. As Shah recounts it:
Without so much as informing the cane farmers or their leaders, not to add the joint working committee, Panday met with Caroni and settled his strike: he won recognition from Caroni. But that left the cane farmers out in the cold, which was pointed out to Panday. He was told that Williams was using the old ‘divide and rule’ tactic to break the unity between farmers and workers. Panday refused to reconsider his decision to order his workers back to work (we received the news on a Saturday; he sent the workers back on the Monday), even though we tried to reason with him, to point out that we had both Caroni and the PNM Government on the ropes, and we should move to deliver the knockout punch. His response was: “From now on, every tub must sit on its own bottom!” And so the strike of 1974 came to an end.
Panday — even at his most charismatic and grassroots — could talk multi-racial co-operation but would not endorse the self-directed power of a multi-racial working class. He understood his role to be the final boss standing in the way of the “creolized” Indians who threatened to knock out the racial order of party politics once and for all. Instead, multi-racial unity remained an ideal to be brokered between politicians and bureaucrats as representative voices of distinct ethnic and racial polities. The masses would not be permitted to do so on their own authority.
To say that Panday abandoned his convictions to embrace the racially polarized theatre of parliamentary elections requires us to ignore the continuities between his two faces. The trade union bureaucracy cannot serve two masters at once. It either serves the workers or management. In the final instance, Panday chose the latter.
The Clever and Mischievous Meanings of Afro-Creole and Indo-Creole
Behind the scenes of Basdeo Panday’s labour politics we may find the wielding of clever and mischievous meanings of Afro-Creole and Indian-Creole. If Afro-Creole elites came to be condemned as Afro-Saxons during the Black Power movement to expose their internalized white racism, Indo-Trinidadian political figures worried about creolized Indians in a different fashion.
Both classes of elites — while appearing divided in the realm of party politics — feared having their masquerades of racial chauvinism and patronage exposed by ordinary people themselves. The authoritarian trade unionism of Bhadase Maharaj, for instance, maintained a racial separation of labour while securing clandestine relationships of patronage with Eric Williams’ PNM Government.
Maharaj, and later Panday, presented themselves as labour leaders but led under a paternal assumption that the workers themselves were pre-modern, backward, and insular peasants. It was this class of ethnic elites that derided those creolized Indians who could not be corralled by racial insecurity and espoused a multi-racial society led by the working class against the state and capitalism. Therefore, to label someone a “creolized Indian” was to suggest they were a dangerous modern person, and perhaps took unity with Africans beyond cheap symbolism too seriously. The clash between Panday and Shah implied that Shah and his creole ilk threatened to upset the apple cart of elite brokerage and ethnic patronage as hierarchical forces conspired to divide Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian labour.
From Labour to White Hall
Panday’s reprised this role in the United Labour Front (ULF) movement of 1975–1977, led by Weekes, Shah, Richard Jacobs and himself. Often remembered as a flashpoint of the “revolutionary seventies,” the ULF was actually a retreat from the high tide of resistance Trinidad and the Caribbean saw from 1968–1974. Abandoning armed struggle, insurgent rebellion, and workers self-management for a parliamentary strategy in which it contested elections against Williams and the PNM, the ULF embodied a vision of state planning of the economy that trade union bureaucrats wished to impose on parliamentary and party politics. It was a retreat from the confrontation with imperialism that brought heightened state repression at home and abroad.
Panday’s relationship to ANR Robinson, Lloyd Best, and others in his next venture with the National Alliance for Reconstruction (1984–1990) is where Panday attained his first cabinet positions. But tellingly he deferred to Robinson, an Afro-Creole from Tobago, rather than vying for the Office of the Prime Minister himself. On this basis, Panday appeared sensitive to the search for national unity, federation, and seemed to patiently await his later turn to be the first Indo-Trinidadian prime minister. There was clear implication in the air that an end to PNM rule did not bring with it an end to Afro-Creole political hegemony.
Just as Panday was leaving the NAR coalition to form the United National Congress, he had appeared to establish himself over many years in the distinguished position of Leader of the Opposition. Perceived by many Indo-Trinidadians, especially ordinary working men and women in the villages as a staunch defender of Indian rights and dignity, as a politician of moral principles, at the same time a conflicting tendency was present. While he may have been perceived as the standard for the coming self-determination of Indo-Trinidadians in electing their very own prime minister, Panday also had expressed political opportunism that stirred distrust among a significant section of Indo-Trinidadians.
In the early 1990s, Hulsie Bhaggan, a member of parliament, became the most vehement and stubborn critic of Panday. In her clash with the Silver Fox, she took many by surprise. As the “sugar belt queen,” she renewed Panday’s populism and cast it against him. She led a popular self-mobilisation of a new generation of Indo-Trinidadian women whose mothers overwhelmingly did not aspire to public life. She started her own political party after rupturing with the UNC — the Movement for Unity and Progress. For a time, Bhaggan to jeers, stood up to the patriarchy in Panday’s UNC. As she was finishing college, she began a national campaign against corruption in the building of the Caroni race track. She defended fellow villagers in Guayamare from being menaced by highway construction, flooding, and rising food prices.
But her advocacy against women’s violence was shadowed by association with and refusal to disavow stereotypes and irrational fears in the Indo-Trinidadian community of Black men as sexually violent. As Panday faced protests from a former staffer against his history of sexual harassment, this confirmed Bhaggan’s charges but shrouded the limitations of her efforts to cultivate the popular will. Bhaggan astutely condemned Panday’s patriarchy to depict him unfit to serve as political leader or prime minister. But where she challenged Panday in content she concurred in form. Both, in their populist gestures, sought only to speak for Indo-Trinidadians as their charismatic mouthpiece. Panday and Bhaggan, in this way, sketched the blueprint for Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Trinidad and Tobago’s first woman and second Hindu Indo-Trinidadian prime minister.
The Silver Fox in White Hall
Panday’s populism prevailed in the 1995 elections, when he formed a coalition with the NAR (and appointed ANR Robinson as President) to confirm his victory as the nation’s first Indo-Trinidadian Prime Minister. His tenure from 1995–2001 was marred by internal disputes within his party (as he fought off corruption allegations from upstart personalities like Attorney General Ramesh Maharaj) and conflicts with estranged comrades including Robinson, who memorably ended Panday’s hold on the executive by appointing the PNM’s Patrick Manning as Prime Minister in the deadlocked elections of 2001.
Panday accused Robinson of harboring a secret agenda tinged with “racial overtones” to oust him as Prime Minister. For many, this marked an unfortunate descent from Panday’s ideals of multi-racial co-operation to the sordid swamp of racial party politics. Is this when the mask came off the other face of Panday? On the contrary, we have demonstrated that this is entirely consistent with Panday as a historical personality. He was not afraid to stoke the fires of racial insecurity among his political base or perpetuate circuits of ethnic patronage. For Panday, multi-racial unity was a compact to be forged by elite personalities such as Robinson, Manning, and himself — not among the working people of Trinidad and Tobago.
The True Face of Panday, Revealed
In retrospect, Panday’s public life came to an end with the corruption scandal surrounding the Piarco Airport Development Project that implicated Panday and prominent UNC financiers Steve Ferguson and Ishwar Galbaransingh. After his arrest on corruption charges in 2005, Panday refused bail and remained incarcerated. In this performance of civil disobedience, he appeared to rebel in defense of his party base by refusing to submit to the ruling PNM. But once again, it was not the party rank-and-file, but his elite sponsors with whom he stood in principled defense.
Panday, at his best, whether we place it with the Workers and Farmers Party campaign of 1965–1966 or United Labour Front of 1975–1977, was never an opponent of “parasitic oligarchy.” From his earliest adventures in organised labour, Panday treated the oligarchy with compassion and the workers themselves with contempt. Rather than two faces — of working class champion and ethnic overlord — Panday is made whole when we remember him for what he always was.
In the calypso, “Panday Needs Glasses,” Watchman suggested that the Silver Fox had been a man of vision and integrity, but when he became prime minister he lost his sight. Watchman maintained that Panday had two faces, one clear-sighted and the other mercenary and lacking in vision. But in his roles as trade unionist and Prime Minister alike, Panday never functioned as a political peer of Trinidad or Caribbean toilers. Even in his most charismatic moments, he spoke for rather than dwelled with the masses of working people in the final instance. Whether Panday weighed sugar cane, took measures, or cut it himself, he always placed the masses of Indo-Trinidadians in the shadow of state power and few ever tried sufficiently to pull his coat from this fateful embrace.
At this moment of national honors and military salute, to elevate Basdeo Panday is consistent with every prime minister before him. It is customary to do so in an ordinary country. But the invented luster around his political legacy — one his actual actions did not create — is a product of a time when Trinidad and Tobago was an extraordinary country contrary to the legacy of Panday. It was an era when Trinidad vied to lead the world in its vision of post-colonial revolt.
Lying in State Before Passing Away
Most recognize that the skirmish over the leadership of the ULF (once it displaced the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) as the main opposition party, that Panday won initially, was replaced by Shah, then won again as a prelude to the NAR coalition), exposed that Panday conceived of his role as labour leader to be that of a pragmatic leader of the entire nation. Panday was able to overcome criticism that he was “bourgeois” minded in the 1970s, since direct democracy and workers self-management were rarely if ever the content of the future socialist society most were working for. It was the decline of this advocacy and social motion that made it inevitable that criticism of the national bourgeoisie as a treacherous, not an aspiring pragmatic social class in the Caribbean, declined as well.
In 2010, shortly after Kamla Persad-Bissessar succeeded Patrick Manning as Prime Minister, Manning and Panday attended a reunion for past students of Presentation College. The longtime political rivals, both graduates of the prestigious secondary school in San Fernando, rubbed shoulders at the event where school officials shared their desire “to organise a football match with Manning leading one team and Panday the other.”
It is an apt metaphor to reduce politics to an athletic spectacle in which the masses are relegated to the sidelines. Indeed, Manning and Panday took turns as Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, tearing each other down and picking each other up. When all was said and done, both stood tall upon the fraud of party politics in Trinidad and Tobago. Both were militantly hostile to any idea that ordinary people in the Caribbean might directly govern themselves. In their theater of deception, Manning and Panday were “lying in state” long before either passed away. In doing so, they conveyed a certain vision of multi-racial unity brokered between privileged representatives behind closed doors and at prestige school receptions. We must lay waste to this vision for the people of Trinidad and Tobago to arrive on their own authority.
