TRINIDAD and Tobago owes a debt of gratitude to the East Indian community on the occasion of Indian Arrival Day.
This was the message of head of the Citizens Union of Trinidad and Tobago Phillip Edward Alexander on Sunday.
He said, “Today the grandchildren of India could stand proud of their culture of thrive to survive, where meagre rations were transformed into national culinary culture and where humble wages became successful family businesses that together today make up one of the largest employers in the country.
“Their message should be clear to all and it is this we must pay notice to today, that regardless the hardship, the betrayal, the advantages wrought against you, if we band together and work to keep each other sheltered we could weather any storm.”
Therefore he said the nation-state of T&T owes a debt to the East Indian community for that lesson.
He said the East Indians arrived on these shores with all their hopes, dreams and aspirations tied to an indentureship contract that would soon be betrayed.
Alexander added, “The people who entered into the contract in good faith (were) reduced to slave-like conditions for the duration and then abandoned, most never to see home again.”
He said, “While others choose to build narratives on platitudes and the rewriting of history, I prefer today to face the truth about the misery that was the start of modern day T&T, a misery predicated on the weak by the strong, where laws kept those without power subjugated and where human beings were seen as a means to profit.”
He said the grandchildren of the indentured servants survived the worst that was thrown at them all through modern times and even after Independence, and created a culture of survival in the face of betrayal.
Alexander added that they went on to become the largest and wealthiest sub-group in T&T in spite of all of it.
He said, “On behalf of the rest of us flung together on these shores for whatever reason who continue on in the struggle of the ancestors, I want to acknowledge the history and the lesson, and to say thank you.”
