I met a staunch supporter of the Labour party the other day and she couldn’t stop raving about the 77 th anniversary celebrations of the Labour party and about how great her leader’s speech was. I smiled because I thought she was pulling my leg. I mean, she is an intelligent woman, surely she can see through the hype? It turned out she was in fact being earnest. And she told me that if I let go of my prejudices and my “ momentary anger” against her leader, then surely I would see how wonderful Navin Ramgoolam was.

Yes, added another person ( this one was defi nitely being sarcastic), they say you’re now an agent of the opposition. “ They” turned out to be another person, well past his sell by date, hired as a “ special advisor” to the Prime Minister.

This got me thinking. Both the Labourite and the advisor were articulate, intelligent people. The first one was so blinded by her love for her leader that her red blinkers wouldn’t allow her to think critically about anything the leader said or did. The other one was more cynical and was not guided by love his interests lay in Navin Ramgoolam staying in power and all those who threaten those interests need to be neutralized. They need to be attacked, they need to be made out to have hidden agendas or axes to grind so that they are perceived as being biased.

The strategy is as pathetic as it is obvious. The problem with this tactic however is that those who have designed it have thoroughly underestimated the intelligence of the public – those who don’t wear blinkers and if Ramgoolam’s moles and “ special advisors” would care to step out once in a while and not just socialize with people too scared or too obliging to tell it as it is, they would know it.

Instead they advised the Prime Minister on a speech that said absolutely nothing, that exposed the vacuousness of his vision.

If a leader has to resort to recounting what his party stood for 70 years ago to give him credence, it tells me there is something very wrong. If a Prime Minister has to revive a dead partisan newspaper to be able to respond to criticisms made against his government, against allegations of cronyism, of corruption, it tells me that he doesn’t believe in institutions anymore. If a Prime Minister has to resort to threats, to playing up one community against the other, to enquiries on the sly in the private lives of his opponents and of journalists, it tells me he is very scared indeed.

By the way, it amazes me that a man of Ramgoolam’s intelligence doesn’t know what the role of the press is, that he confuses public interests with personal and partisan interests. Unless of course, he’s just pretending because it serves his purposes.

And this in itself is pregnant in meaning.