Where have all the Indians gone?
By Kevin Baldeosingh (express)
Story Created: Aug 1, 2013.
In his book The Underachieving Society, economist Terrence Farrell writes that the Central Statistical Office (CSO) is so incompetent “that there are now serious questions about the integrity and reliability of certain data produced”. And last Monday’s by-election result clearly prove Farrell’s claim.
You see, the CSO in its 2011 census says that 46 per cent of the population of Chaguanas is Indian and nearly 60 per cent of those Indians are Hindu. Yet, in Chaguanas West, where most of the Indian Hindu reincarnated voters live, a black man was able to get 69 per cent of the votes cast. This shows that the CSO cannot count Indians, by which I mean real Indians, not people like me who Food Production Minister Devant Maharaj back in his Maha Sabha days used to describe as “creolised Indians”.
Mind you, I had predicted that Jack would lose badly, not because he was black, but because I thought people in Chaguanas West would vote for whoever could give them more drains and roads and scotch, which naturally was the Government. But the Chaguanas West voters were smarter than me, since they realised that by voting for Jack they would get goodies from him and even more goodies from the UNC administration for 2015.
Those voters have been criticised for electing a individual with serious ethical defects, but I never considered corruption to be an issue because, as far as public if not legal opinion goes, the choice was between a corrupt party and a corrupt individual. And, in any case, neither United National Congress (UNC) fanatics nor PNM-till-Ah-deads have ever voted against corruption, which may be why only 2,000 persons who voted in Chaguanas West in 2010 stayed away from the polls this time. But even these people cannot be the Indians, real Indians, that the CSO refuses to count.
After all, this is why Devant and Mr Suruj Rambachan PhD and Attorney General Anand Ramlogan SC (Self-Conferred) rolled up behind red woman Khadijah Ameen in the campaign. They wanted to send a message to Indians, real Indians, to vote UNC. In fact, Anand was so committed to this goal that on polling day his security detail in their black Prado even knocked down a man who Anand said was drunk. How much more Indian than that can you get? Yet all the Indian Hindus the CSO says are infesting Chaguanas West apparently still voted for black Jack, proving that the 2011 census figures are, as Farrell says, badly flawed.
After all, Housing Minister Roodal Moonilal told UNC supporters that depriving him of a Range Rover belonging to the Housing Development Corporation was an attack on Hindus. Yet these putative thousands of Chaguanas West Hindus still didn’t vote for the UNC or fat men. On top of that, Maha Sabha leader Sat Maharaj also came out in support of Khadijah, presumably because she lacks panty-lines. It is true that, in 2007, Sat supported the Congress of the People and that party still didn’t win any seats, but that’s only because the COP didn’t have real Indians, the kind who can eat dhal and rice with their fingers. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar even bowed down and touched Sat’s feet in the mandir which hosted the political meeting, an act which should have made all devout Hindus either run out and vote UNC immediately or wash their hands with cow’s milk even faster.
And then Khadijah, just one day before the election, announced that she would be getting married, which should have impressed all Hindus who are biased against six-foot-tall single mothers. Yet Khadijah’s promise to be shorter than her fiancé apparently did not persuade the Indian voters to vote for her, which leads to the obviously absurd conclusion that Indians no longer respect people who use marital status to win an election.
All this either means that Hindus are rejecting their gurus or that the CSO has refused to count Hindus in Chaguanas West.
And, since all Hindus obey their gurus without question, it must be the CSO which is at fault. After all, all racists know that all Indians racial and would never vote for an African man. One woman on Facebook, a dougla who didn’t get any genes for curry, even said that Indian columnists never criticise the present Government: and, when I cited Clarence Rambharat, Vaneisa Baksh, Sheila Rampersad and me, she explained that she didn’t read columnists with Indian surnames and that Jack got votes only because Indians like money more than they dislike black people.
But, being a tutor in UWI’s Humanities Department, this woman was too innumerate to know that the real reason Jack won is because the CSO has miscounted Indians in Chaguanas West. It cannot be that Indians and Africans have stopped voting by race because, if this is so, then the Maha Sabha and the Emancipation Support Committee will no longer get millions of taxpayers’ dollars to play dress up.
E-mail:
kevin.baldeosingh@zoho.com
