NRIs cheer Mamata cell – Caribbean celebrates initiative, Trinidad PM to come calling
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New York, June 6: When Mamata Banerjee announced the creation of a special cell in her government to serve non-residents and people of Indian origin, the celebrations were in the Caribbean.
Three days after the chief minister announced her new initiative, the Indian origin Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, told Vayalar Ravi, the minister for overseas Indian affairs, that she would visit India in January for the annual conclave of non-resident Indians and talk business with those from Bengal who will be at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas.
Mamata’s initiative also spread ripples of excitement in the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, on the island of Martinique, as well as in Reunion and in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, according to reports reaching the global Indian diaspora.
Forgotten by the present generation of Bengalis, these are Francophone entities or overseas French territories which share a unique bond with Calcutta.
Last weekend, amidst the excitement of new possibilities to revive a neglected chapter in their history following Mamata’s promise, Ravi opened a memorial to the arrival of the first Indians in Guadeloupe as indentured labourers on December 25, 1854.
Fatel Razack, a ship carrying indentured labourers bound for Trinidad and Tobago, had left Calcutta port on February 16, 1845, the first in continuous sailings which lasted until about 1920, according to records in the archives of the ministry of external affairs.
Ravi was in Trinidad and Tobago to mark a national holiday there on May 30, celebrated annually as “Indian Arrival Day” in memory of the first landing of indentured labourers from Calcutta. This year’s celebrations had a special flavour because a person of Indian origin (PIO) was elected Prime Minister last year for only the second time in the country’s history.
Trinidad and Tobago is an energy-rich country with oil and gas accounting for 80 per cent of its exports and a potential partner for Mamata’s government as it taps overseas Indians for investment.
In January this year, when Ravi inaugurated a memorial at Kidderpore Depot located in Garden Reach for hundreds of thousands of such victims of exploitation who set sail from Calcutta in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mamata was present to honour them.
Ravi told The Telegraph during transit here on his way back from the Caribbean that no one from the previous Left Front government attended the emotive inauguration for which several hundred descendants of indentured labourers flew to Calcutta from Guyana, Suriname and other former colonies which took the Indians.
He recalled that many of these descendants who visited the Alipore and Bhawanipore barracks, where indentured recruits awaited a full shipload, or saw the Demerara, Fiji and Suriname depots from where their ancestors sailed were overcome by emotion during the inauguration which was full of symbolism for Caribbean Indians.
An organisation, the Global Indian Diaspora Heritage Society, has since been registered in Calcutta to build a museum and resource centre to tap the history of these Indians who left for distant shores, whose descendants are now elected rulers in some countries they had migrated to.
The Society has already discussed this second phase of the memorial project with the director of archaeology and museums in Calcutta.
It also requested the Bengal government to declare the memorial site inaugurated in January as a place of national heritage, but the then Left Front government paid no heed to the request.
With Mamata’s new initiative for an NRI cell in the government, people of Indian origin in the Caribbean hope that the request will be honoured soon.
Ravi promised his ministry’s full cooperation to the new cell in helping the state government to tap NRI and PIO resources anywhere in the world and in creating connectivity for Bengal as India’s gateway to east Asia.
He described Mamata’s initiative as a “positive step” that was long overdue.
The Left Front government had consistently kept away from the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas where Ravi has taken a special interest in promoting India’s eastern region since he assumed charge of overseas Indian affairs.
The minister said former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had agreed two years ago to attend a session exclusively made up of eastern region chief ministers at the annual conclave of Indians abroad, but backed out later causing immense disappointment.
Both Bengal and Tripura virtually boycotted the Pravasi celebrations since they began unlike Kerala, the minister’s home state, which too was ruled by the Left before the Marxists lost power in the last elections. Tripura, however, sent senior ministers this year in a significant departure.
Mamata’s intention in creating the new cell, however, may have been to target wealthy Bengalis in the US or Europe and not to promote sentiment or write history.
By entrusting the new initiative to finance minister Amit Mitra, who enjoys extensive contacts in the US, the new cell is likely to focus on attracting NRI investment from developed countries.
But it is unlikely that Caribbean Indians will let go of this opportunity to resurrect a neglected chapter in the evolution of the Indian diaspora.
The Calcutta link to that evolution is now known by heart to those who are promoting the city’s memorial project whose inscription reads in part: “By hundreds of thousands, they journeyed from other parts of India to this city, bound for long, arduous journeys by ships on treacherous seas of ‘kala pani’ to places unknown to them…. With due recognition and lasting remembrance of Indian indentured labourers who left these shores during 19th and 20th centuries… for triumph of the spirit of Indianness they maintained and passed on to their descendants.”
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- A Tribute From India to the ‘old Diaspora’
- Indian government to announce merger of PIO/OCI Cards soon
- A remote French Island reconnects with India
- Making Europe a destination for Indian workers
Filed Under: PIO Diaspora
