Memorial to the Silver Fox

The late Basdeo Panday—lawyer, politician, trade unionist, economist, actor, and civil servant—who served as the fifth PM of T&T from 1995 to 2001, who died on January 1, 2024, and is to have a state funeral was every bit a renaissance man. Very unlike a politician, he couldn’t be mealy-mouthed or speak from both sides of his face. Even if you didn’t like what he said, you felt the Silver Fox leapt before he looked, with a canny feline intuition, so his quips and barbs delivered with faultless, often hilarious Shakespearean timing often felled his quarry.

Yet that half grin, the glint in his eye, showed a man who essentially meant well for his fellow man. If he had to have an epitaph, it would be the Latin proverb “Audentes Fortuna Luvat” (Fortune Favours The Brave). His circumstances changed, but he remained undefeated, the man who could defeat lions. He has always been there throughout my career, and I suspect he is part of us somehow. I interviewed him several times. The following are some vignettes, excerpts of columns, some written decades apart. The first was written after a television interview, the second after he came home after a health scare, and the third after he was convicted for failing to declare a bank account in London.

• EXCERPT 1 I’m Not God December 24, 1995

An interview with the prime minister was fixed for the Friday before he complained of chest pains. Not familiar with the PM’s house, I swung in at the posh entrance, where guards brusquely told me to “go round to the back.” On the grounds, hundreds of children were being taken out of the rain into the enormous striped tents. Speakers blared Christmas music. Sticky ice cream cheeks were offered to Mrs Panday for a kiss in return for a gift. A cup of orange fizzy stuff went flying across a table. A flushed prime minister was kneeling, smiling broadly at a little boy in a wheelchair.

They had come in busloads from homes across the country, St Dominic’s Children’s Home, Penal Special School, Princess Elizabeth Home, in their best clothes for their Christmas party hosted by the Pandays. We set up inside the drawing room—festive, overwhelmingly peach, the ribboned flowers matching the fat ribboned Christmas tree. The doors are thrown open to reveal a very English arcade wound with flowers and leaves.

The prime minister came in as exuberant as the children he was entertaining, ready to do the interview. I asked if he’d had a look at the questions. He barely glanced at the crumpled faxed paper, said: “Ask me anything,” and then wandered off to find his jacket. As he settled down in front of the camera, he said: “I don’t know how the Mannings lived here. It is too hot to entertain in this room,” adding, “positively plebeian”. Then, in a lower, confidential tone, “Oma doesn’t want to move, you know. She prefers our home in the South.”

He fielded questions on the parasitic oligarchy and alienation and his meeting with the Jamaat with ease in a series of usable sound bites. He is, by turn, complex and blunt, cliched and earnest. But you can’t pin the man down to say he is this or that. He eludes categories. Even as you shoot a question in one direction, he spins into another. This is frustrating and interesting—like the CD from the computer game Mist. It comes with no rules. And being a dramatist, he never fails to provide comic relief—even if it is at your expense.

Halfway through the interview, while a minor change in lighting was taking place, I began to sweat. It really was hot. Trying to cover up my discomfort, I said, patting my shiny face, “You must forgive me, it is not every day that I interview a prime minister.” The silver fox pounced: “Well, you never had that problem when I was opposition leader.” Who tell me to say that? The television interview was over, and I asked him if he minded answering a few personal questions. He was amenable. It went something like this.

What kind of teenager were you? “Miserable, cantankerous, all kinds of bad things ...”

What were your ambitions and dreams? “I was born in 1933 in extreme poverty and dreamed of going to England and studying. In those days, you did either law or medicine. I had done humanities: Latin, French, Spanish, and the natural choice was law.”

How did you feel about England? “Nothing. I just wanted an education. I arrived in England with £20 in my pocket—a hundred dollars. I worked as a labourer and electrician—worked and studied. Nine years later, I had done the bar and had a degree in Economics and one in Drama. I was coming home to see my parents because I had a Commonwealth scholarship to do my PhD in political science at the Delhi School of Economics. I thought I would end up an academic. “When I returned, Stephen Maharaj and CLR James were engaged in a struggle over the Industrial Stabilisation Act. I got involved with them and plunged in, feet first, where angels fear to tread, and never turned back. That led to the formation of an Industrial Court. With my background in law and economics, I became a legal adviser to the Oilfield Workers Trade Union in 1956. I marched with them, got arrested, and began developing a reputation as a labour leader myself.”

Did youthful idealism and rebellion lead you to the trade union movement? “I thought I was doing the right thing, that’s all. I was involved, struggling and fighting, being beaten up by workers. So, I became the leader of the All Trinidad and Sugar Workers Union. It just happened. How did you enter politics? “In 1966, I contested elections in the Workers and Farmers party led by CLR James and Steve Maraj. The object was not to support the racism of the DLP and the PNM because we thought that was ripping the nation apart. So we formed this party, which would appeal to people across the racial board, a party based for workers—along class lines. We fell flat on our face—we lost our deposits because the country was steeped in racial politics.”

So, how do you think your parents would react today? You being prime minister? “They would have been happy. I’ll never forget my dear father who told me in 1966 (he lights up the way older people do when they remember their parents, even now revelling in his father’s humour, which he clearly inherited), ‘I will vote for you, but only because you are my son.’”

Tell me about your relationship with Dr Eric Williams. “The first time he called me was nine in the night. I got a message saying the prime minister wants me to contact him. I called him back and said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I want to see you on a certain matter.’ I left San Fernando and came to Port-of-Spain. In this very house, Dr Williams said, ‘I want to re-establish the constitutional convention of discussions with the leader of the opposition on matters of national concern.’ I replied that I would see him whenever he wanted to see me, only if he would agree to see me when I wanted to see him. He agreed. So whenever anything bothered either of us, we would meet here or in the Parliament tea room. He realised that his job was to run the Government, and mine was to replace him. I would do my best to get him out, and he would do his best to stay there. We had a tremendous relationship.”

What went wrong with Hulsie Bhagan? “Hulsie had great potential. But she had the weakness of over-ambition and was misled by people who told her she was prime ministerial material after being in politics for two years. I’ve been there for 30, like Williams and even Manning, who has been in it for a long time. Somebody blew her head and told her she could be PM after two years.” Any hope of a reconciliation? Now he was exasperated, expostulating, “I don’t know the future. I’m not God.”

Does the child in you sometimes wake up in the morning and say, “I’m prime minister?” “No, when I was the opposition leader, I’d go to bed at different times— but once I hit the sack, the grass could grow on me. Now I find myself waking up at 2 am, worrying about unemployment, vagrancy ... and my nights have become sleepless.” The lights were taken off, and the prime minister hugged the camerawoman, daughter of the late George Weekes, Genieve, asked after her mother, shook hands with the rest of us, looked around and inquired, “I could go?” Then he tiptoed across the room as we wound up our work. Thirty-six hours later, he was taken to Mount Hope for angina pains.

• EXCERPT 2 Welcome home to the statesman —Basdeo Panday January 7, 1996

Dear Mr Panday, Welcome home. I expect you are now busy catching up on the newspapers— quietly, I hope, with your feet up and a cup of coffee nearby—your precious minutes before you resume your rigorous schedule tomorrow (or have you plunged straight in?). And the country also feels it can relax as it has come through another crisis. You must remember that right after you were appointed prime minister, your government was formed in a sea of question marks over the coalition, the meaning of national unity, and the credentials of your Cabinet. But just as we were prepared to sail smoothly from Christmas to Carnival, we had to stiffen with concern at your departure. Little did you realise that in your absence, the country decided to give you what you’d been calling for. As people in this country never fail to do in times of crisis, we banded together to survive. We sat silently in red in 1989 after our defeat in football (I would like to think we got a national holiday not for “losing” but for our collective dignity in the face of defeat). We stood by the rule of law in 1990. (except for the looting–allow us our aberrations) We may be fickle, but we don’t play dirty when the chips are really down.

This year, our anxiety was replaced by something extraordinarily humane. It was as if a country, faced with losing you, tucked away her grievances and differences and responded to you as a human being. As the week unfolded, editorials wished you godspeed and told you to take care of yourself. (We monitored you closely. Telephone conversations were punctured with “Hold on—it’s about Mr Panday—let me just hear the news.”) The picture emerged of a nation rallying behind not a party man but the prime minister of T&T. And whenever that happens, we reach a state of grace.

• EXCERPT 3 Open letter to imprisoned former PM —Basdeo Panday May 7, 2008

Dear Mr Panday, The dust has settled on the debate set off by the imbroglio of your prosecution, imprisonment and bail. It was big news because you are Mr Basdeo Panday—former trade unionist representing thousands of sugar workers, former prime minister of T&T and former chairman of the Opposition UNC. Two weeks ago, you were an open target for us all. Pinioned behind bars, vulnerable, facing two years of hard labour in prison. We all had a go at the man whose rapier mouth once had the power to make and break political careers. Even then, few believed you were “finished”. But with your resignation as chairman of the UNC, to see the sun setting on you, who embodied your “rising sun” political party, was disconcerting. We still had our gloves up, thinking you had one more trick up your sleeve, that you would be the power behind bars if need be. Just so, Bas? It was so simple to escape the barbs. (Some deserved, admittedly). Did you simply pull the rug from under your feet by doing the right thing? You acknowledged that people in public life have to be seen as exemplars.

You resigned because you couldn’t take the UNC with the “yoke of my conviction hanging around its neck” into the next election. We assumed wrongly you would be wrong and strong with a shrug of your shoulders and another exasperating quip. But you walked. Now that we can neither dehumanise nor see you as larger than life, we must confront the real thing. A flawed human being who has messed up emerged gaunt and ill from a 24-hour stint in prison, a man who has also achieved greatness impacted on thousands, from weeping former sugar workers who remember what you did for them, to the Baptists who haven’t forgotten your acknowledgement of them. As for the regrets, the lost potential of what you could have done. You can’t have it all, Bas, and you can’t do it all. But even as you exit from politics and walk off into the sunset, all but the absolutely churlish have to rise and salute you.

Ira Mathur has been a Trinidad Guardian columnist since 1995.

Website: www.irasroom.org Email: irasroom@gmail.com.