Dear Editor,
Thanks for allowing me to share this brief tribute-oriented correspondence with others. As Komal Chand – “Comrade Komal”- has beaten me to an early departure, I’m obliged to wish his working-class, and socialist- inclined soul all the rest it now deserves. I so do, via this.
Just recently I make a startling, pleasant but very belated discovery. It had to do with my visiting, as a younger teenager in the early sixties the Cheongs at Vauxhall in Canal Number
One, WBD. One of the lovely Cheong girls, Yvonne, was married to a shop-owner right there named Dalchand. That one-name gentleman Dalchand was/ is Comrade Komal’s elder brother.
For the decades I knew and interacted with Komal I never realized that. So we never discussed the fact that as a youngster I would be in Dalchand’s grocery occasionally.
Pardon me for finding some oblique “spiritual connection” with Komal there.
Komal was a PPP Jaganite to the bone but when somehow I “connected” with him more closely,
after1997, he never would display or flaunt his PPP-ness. Though he would tantalise me subtly
about my PNC past, he was gracious, soft-spoken and primarily a dedicated Trade-Union
Leader. (I would tantalise in return that he was “GAWU President-for-life”- like Patrick Yarde (GPSU).
Never given to any racism I could detect, Komal’s GAWU, after a mighty struggle replaced
the MPCA Company Union and won the right to represent the interests of some 20,000 sugar workers at one time. But GAWU also represented robustly Afro-workers at Barama Forestry undertakings and all Fisheries Companies. (How I enjoy many May Days for that latter reason!)
As all leaders would, he attracted criticism from some columnists and fellow labour leaders alike. How could he represent his workers interests whilst representing the PPP government in Parliament? They asked. What better forum to be, Komal reasoned. Then he would point to Britain’s Labour Government Leaders, many West Indian Prime Ministers, Comrades Burnham and Hoyte (GLU).
Up until 2014 I used to produce some features for GAWU’s Combat newspaper and would edit some of his May 01, Labour Day presentations. Just two anecdotes from those days: he had “nothing against Viola Burnham” – the wife of the PPP’s nemesis Forbes; secondly, he would complain to me that “that young chap would really fret me, upset me yeh Fenty.” Who? Bharrat!
It also came as a mild surprise to me years ago that Komal Chand himself was never a sugar
worker! Yet his life-long dedication to their cause and to the vital industry was all the more remarkable. He did have at his side, for thirty-five solid years, the equally-dedicated, faithful unionist Seepaul Narine – an actual former sugar worker from the fields who has risen under his mentor’s guidance, to even visit the labour union capitals of the world.
I close by noting my batch mate Labour Minister Keith Scott’s sincere tribute to comrade
Komal as I regret that only one President (His Excellency) returned successfully from Cuba’s health care but another (Komal) President of the largest ever trade Union, could not.
I now ask family and authorities: let there be some farewell funeral- however limited! Farewell,
walk good comrade Komal.
Yours faithfully
Allan Arthur Fenty
