PM: Victory makes East Indian women feel they've arrived
Kim Boodram
Sunday, May 30th 2010
IN her first public speech as Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar on Friday night hailed her victory at the May 24 polls as one that has brought a sense of ’arrival’ to East Indian women in Trinidad and Tobago.
Persad-Bissesar made the statement during a surprise appearance at the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS) Indian Arrival Day dinner at the Centre of Excellence, Macoya
Indian Arrival Day will be celebrated across the country today. Several guests at the dinner said Persad-Bissessar’s general election win was the best gift they could have received on this occasion.
Along with newly-appointed Attorney General, Anand Ramlogan, and a number of newly sworn-in MPs of the People’s Partnership, the country’s first woman PM ’brought down the house’ when she swept into the function around 8 p.m.
The schedule was changed to accommodate brief addresses by Persad-Bissessar and Ramlogan, who also delivered his first address since being appointed AG on Wednesday.
’It was at this same dinner last year that I really launched my campaign,’ Persad-Bissessar said, referring to her address that night, ’Indian Women in Public Life’.
She went on to say that her own victory has helped Indian women around T&T to feel that they have, indeed, arrived and to feel a sense of belonging.
She added that most women also now saw in her achievements a victory for their great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mothers, who toiled under often adversarial conditions to raise their children.
Persad-Bissessar also called on the nation to celebrate its diversity, saying it would be a mistake to think that every is the same.
Head of the SDMS, Sat Maharaj, agreed with Persad-Bissessar and said she has shown the country that Indian women are strong and progressive.
’There are citizens who are of the misguided notion that the Indian woman is a submissive female,’ said Maharaj, who has expressed his support for Persad-Bissesar since her campaign for the leadership of the United National Congress’ (UNC) during the party’s internal elections, which she won on January 24 of this year.
’Mrs. Persad-Bissessar has certainly shown us the substance and strength of Indian women.’
He added that her climb to the Office of the Prime Minister is a justification of the efforts of those men and women who sought to change the culture among Indians of depriving their daughters of an education.
’The culture then was that girls were married off young, there was no education and no academic career,’ Maharaj said.
AG Ramlogan, in a quick acknowledgement, said he intends to uphold the same the level of justice and equality that he fought for his years as an attorney.
Also giving a shortened address was history scholar, Dr, Dennison Moore, who disputed several key points of what is accepted as the history of Indians the Caribbean and in T&T.
Among them, Moore claimed that the actual date of arrival in T&T is May 3 and not May 30 and the ocean vessel most famed among East Indian descendents today, the Fath al Razack, may not have been the ship described by scholars at the time.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/nart?id=161683525&weba=NWSNews