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Tolerating Mr Panday
Posted: Sunday, June 9, 2002

By Donna Yawching

DISCIPLINE, Production, and Appreciation. Has quite the ring to it, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it look great on our national shield? Sure, if we want to be the laughingstock of the literate world. Not that this would matter much to Basdeo Panday, or his echo, Sat Maharaj, both of whom are so wrapped up in their own rhetoric that they can’t even hear when they’re making utter fools of themselves.

What’s wrong with these people, anyway? Why do they try so hard to manufacture problems? Don’t we have enough as it is? Yet there they both are, having fallen upon a new catchword (Bas first, of course, and blind followers hard on his heels), and now ready to work it to death.

All of a sudden, we’re hearing that Panday doesn’t want to be tolerated, he wants to be appreciated. Appreciated for what, exactly? He doesn’t bother to say. Presumably, appreciated because of his sheer Indianness. He doesn’t explain why this mere fact merits appreciation, or whether he is willing to reciprocate with everyone else. (If he is, I should come in for a lot of appreciation, with my pothound heritage of half a dozen different ethnic components. Does all this appreciation translate into money, by any chance? London bank accounts? Because if so, I’m jumping on that bandwagon, effective immediately.)

Can we expect to hear Carlos Iscariot and Gerald Yetming clamouring for appreciation on Mr Panday’s platform anytime soon? Or do they already have it, simply by virtue of not being Indian? Or conversely, do they not deserve it, equally by virtue of not being Indian? It will be interesting to see how Mr Panday’s all-inclusive “Cabinet” is going to react to this one. If they are wise, of course, they will simply ignore him altogether.

But the rest of us should not. Because, in fact, Panday’s latest rant at the Pooja 2002 is one of his most disturbing yet. Using this religious occasion (nothing is sacred to this man, apparently!) to launch his latest unwarranted accusations against Mr Manning, Panday declared that a person who removed his sacred jhandis from the PM’s official residence was a person who would, by definition, be biased in his dealings with Hindus.

Only Panday could make such a quantum leap into absurdity; and only Panday would be allowed to get away with it so easily. Can we equally assume that the person who planted jhandis at the PM’s residence would be similarly biased in his dealings with non-Hindus? What’s sauce for the goose.

The jhandi controversy is so silly that I have little to add to it, except to ask: If Mr Panday had met a large cross, complete with bleeding Jesus, planted in the front garden when he arrived at the official residence, would it be there still? I doubt it. Personally, I think the Prime Ministership should be a secular post, with all beliefs being kept strictly personal, and all artefacts removed upon demission of office. Thank God we’ve never had a cannibal Prime Minister: we’d probably still have a human sacrifice altar out front.

At the end of the day, for anyone who is not a Hindu, a jhandi is nothing more than an unsightly bamboo pole with a tatter of flags at the top; just as, for the non-Christian, a crucifix is a distasteful depiction of a man being tortured to death. The holiness of both are strictly in the eyes of the beholder; and I would be very surprised to hear that Mr Manning is shaking in his boots because Mr Panday left some coins buried in the ground, or a big stone somewhere out in the yard.

Panday was, as usual, trying to make some political mileage out of the jhandi non-issue; and was tasteless enough to use a religious occasion on which to do it. (Imagine a Catholic politician doing the same at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve! The priest wouldn’t put up with it.) But much more disturbing than these cheap theatrics was his dismissal of the concept of “tolerance”, both in our national motto and (presumably) within the nation. Has anyone stopped to think what this actually implies?

The opposite of tolerance is not “appreciation”, it is intolerance. A quick scan of the global scene will show exactly where intolerance—religious, ethnic, personal—leads. Intolerance leads to wars, it leads to pogroms, it leads to ethnic cleansings (the real kind). It has led people to lynch Blacks in the American south, and to push Pakistanis onto the subway line in Britain. It leads to religious massacres, to today’s neo-nazis, and to the persecution of homosexuals, sometimes even unto death. It leads to September 11, and far worse. Mr. Panday should not play with words without understanding their import; that is the mark of the illiterate.

Including the word “tolerance” in our national motto was one of Eric Williams’ most inspired moves. “Discipline” was wishful thinking, and “Production” was optimistic; but in a nation cobbled together from a dozen quarrelsome ethnic groups, “Tolerance” was more than just a warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good concept; it was an absolute necessity. It still is.

Tolerance doesn’t mean that anyone has to like or “appreciate” anyone else, or anyone else’s culture; that is a matter of choice, and personal taste. In our motto, “Tolerance” is not a choice; it is virtually an order. It means that , as a citizen of this country, you are expected to accept others, and their right to be different. It imposes the obligation to co-exist peacefully. In today’s world, that is immeasurably valuable: and yet, here is Mr Panday, eager to throw it out, in favour of something as shallow as “appreciation”. Surely that tells us something about the man.

However, if Panday insists that he does not wish to be tolerated, I am happy to accommodate him, on at least one level. Let me assure him that he is, indeed, becoming “intolerable”; and a moment of intelligent silence on his part would be greatly “appreciated.” Little chance of that, though. Unfortunately.



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