Prime Minister’s Indian Arrival Day Message 2024

MESSAGE TO THE NATION

FROM DR THE HONOURABLE KEITH ROWLEY

PRIME MINISTER OF THE REPUBLIC OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

ON THE OCCASION OF INDIAN ARRIVAL DAY 2024

Fellow citizens, greetings to the East Indian community as they celebrate the one hundred-and-seventy-ninth anniversary, since their first ancestors came to Trinidad on this date, May 30, 1845.

Examining the history of those ancestors, one must marvel at the bold, daring risk they undertook – their fearlessness and courage.  They were agriculture workers and persons from India’s labouring class, who were enticed to leave their homes, thousands of miles away – most from villages in Utter Pradesh and Bihar in northern India, others from Calcutta and the southern regions.

This was the middle of the nineteenth century, when travel meant miles over land, then a three-month voyage, crossing the treacherous Indian Ocean, around southern Africa then across the Atlantic and finally landing in an unheard-of island called, “Chinitat”, the home their children and all other citizens now call The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

As citizens, we all need to understand the arduous struggles of the forefathers of our land.  We all need, as we look forward, to look back, into our nation’s history so that we will approach our collective future with greater clarity and confidence.

We should be minded that after the Abolition of African slavery in 1838, the British colonial authorities set about, replacing the slaves who left the plantations, with some 150,000 Indian indentured immigrants, on contract, over the period 1845 to 1917.

Today, we must all celebrate the strength displayed by subsequent generations of the Indian community, over the past one hundred and seventy-nine years.

Fortunately for the indentured, there were no successful attempts by the colonials of systemic “cultural erasure.” In this new land, they were allowed to retain their religion and their culture, which gave their community a sense of being.

Dr Eric Williams, considered as “the Father of our Nation” stated in 1970 that there could be “No Mother India, No Mother Africa, No Mother China, or Mother Syria, but only Mother Trinidad and Tobago.”

The United Nations Economic Social and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in a position paper on “Multiculturalism” wrote that the “successful management of multiculturalism, and multiethnic societies (as ours) requires not only a democratic polity, but the struggle against social inequalities and exclusion.”

We, in Trinidad and Tobago, can claim proudly that UNESCO was speaking about our history as a nation. As a people we have maintained “a democratic polity” and continue to fight against “social inequalities and exclusion.”

The Indian community, as it looks at its achievements today, can point to its ancestors of 1845, and proudly to the successes of their subsequent generations in various fields that encompass the whole range of this country’s achievements.

Let us all in this nation salute and celebrate with our brothers and sisters.

May God continue to Bless Trinidad and Tobago.