Basdeo Panday

Basdeo Panday was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1995 to 2001, the first of Indian descent in a country that is half Indian and had been governed since independence by the African party of Williams. He was the sugar workers' union leader and barrister who had led the opposition for most of twenty years. He formed the government when the election of November 1995 tied at seventeen seats each and Robinson's two Tobago members chose him. The six years were the growth that came back with the oil. There were the free secondary schooling, the pension raised, and the Indian Arrival Day made a holiday. There was the Piarco airport rebuilt, whose contracts became the corruption case that followed him for twenty years. There were the hangings of 1999, nine men of the Dole Chadee gang in four days, which the Privy Council had tried to stop and the country had wanted. There was the quarrel with the press, whom he called the enemy. There was the election of December 2001 that tied again at eighteen each. Robinson, now president, gave the government to Manning on the grounds of moral and spiritual values. Panday never forgave it. He was born in Princes Town, the son of a shopkeeper. He went to London at twenty-four, worked as a clerk and an actor, read law at Lincoln's Inn and economics at the LSE, and came home in 1965. He took the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers' union in 1973. He led it into the United Labour Front, which won ten seats in 1976 and made him leader of the opposition. He founded the United National Congress in 1989 out of the wreck of the alliance that had beaten Williams's party in 1986. It is still the Indian party. He was charged in 2002 with failing to declare a London bank account, convicted in 2006, sentenced to two years, and freed on appeal. The Piarco charges were dismissed in 2023, forty years of the courts. He left the party's leadership in 2010 to Persad-Bissessar, whom he had made, and who won the office he had lost. He died on New Year's Day 2024, at ninety. He was cremated at the Caroni river with a state funeral and the sugar workers' flags.

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