By Ira Mathur
Let me begin with the selfie — me, standing beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi after his address to a joint sitting of Trinidad and Tobago’s parliament. The image I posted on social media was read as celebration. The moment, some said, was historic. Others — people I love: family, friends from Pakistan — recoiled, accusing me of standing with a man who presided over communal violence against Muslims.
It was neither.
It was record-keeping. It was saying: I will not be erased. I remain a diasporic child of India, the daughter of a Hindu soldier and a Muslim woman. My mother and late father have been honoured by previous high commissions, but not this time. My late father, Colonel Mahendra Nath Mathur, served in three wars — the 1962 Sino Indian War and the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistani Wars — before migrating to Trinidad to build the Claude Noel Highway and write the country’s first National Disaster Preparedness Plan. My mother, a great-great-granddaughter of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum of Bhopal, came from a line of Muslim matriarchs who governed with justice. My widowed mother was not invited to meet Modi.
The event at the Cycling Stadium in Couva, Central Trinidad — billed as a community meeting — was, in reality, a carefully curated gathering by the Indian High Commission, which extended VIP invitations primarily to wealthy or influential Indian immigrants and Indo-Trinidadians seen as sympathetic to Modi’s saffron India. The rest of the stands were filled by anyone who wanted to be there and was asked. I was there on the periphery.
Men in shiny kurtas and jewelled jackets stood in the inner ring; women in sequined saris lurched forward, hands folded in namaste, as Modi walked through. The programme — Bollywood songs, bhajans, ghazals — flattened a complex Trinidad and Tobago identity made up of strands of many continents into spectacle. A loud Indian-ness without meaning.
A guest list with a pecking order curated by caste, clique and compliance. It erased every other creed and race. A poison to our plural society.
This, in a republic where mandirs, mosques and churches stand within walking distance; where Phagwa powders mix with Carnival paint; where neighbours break roti and fast together. This, in a country shaped by the twin traumas of slavery and indenture, plural by bloodline, by birthright, by the intertwined rituals of everyday life.
This was not a state event. It was a stage. And on that stage, the absence of our non-Indian population was glaring: Muslims. Afro Trinidadians. Chinese. Arab. All missing.
Not far away, a small Muslim protest echoed this silence. And in the seats of the stadium, only the favoured sat centre stage. In Port of Spain, CEPEP workers — mostly of African descent, mostly from depressed areas — protested against job losses.
We’ve been here before. Similar visuals, flipped races. We’ve seen this before. Same visuals, flipped races. Prime Minister Patrick Manning built a wall to hide the Beetham before the Summit of the Americas — as if poverty, not injustice, was the shame. He was calculating, careful of the foreign gaze. A.N.R. Robinson accepted a Yoruba chieftaincy and called himself an African Chief — to root himself in ancestral memory, in a history older than the colony. Manning concealed. Robinson reclaimed. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, in her second stint as prime minister, looked composed in saris, gracious, claiming her heritage. But in trying to honour her chief guest, she left too many of her own people watching and feeling left out.
Such a waste. What we could have shown India! Imagine, instead, inheritance. No explanation needed. In Parliament — at the Red House in Port of Spain — the tone shifted as Modi, in a more subdued setting, addressed the nation’s leaders. He spoke of the threat of terrorism, yes, but also of redressing the imbalance between North and South, hinting at India’s supremacy and its ambition to lead. He had already signalled a shift.
In November 2024, he was awarded Guyana’s highest national honour, the Order of Excellence, by President Dr Irfaan Ali, a practising Muslim. It was a gesture recognising Modi’s leadership and international engagement, evidence that he was moving to the centre. The High Commission had misread the moment. Modi was seeking a place in a world that embraced, rather than flattened, identity.
In the seat of government, the systems held. The armed forces, the judiciary, the ceremonial protocol — all stood firm. The Red House, beautifully restored, carried the gravitas of history. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar herself was deft, held her own.
But yet another opportunity was missed. The Opposition Leader, an African Trinidadian woman, dressed in a tasteful Indian gown, gracious and welcoming in her presence, was not asked to speak. What a lost moment.
In his third term, Modi faces deepening unrest. In Kashmir, the revocation of Article 370 continues to breed resentment. In Punjab and Manipur, government crackdowns and ethnic violence have fuelled alienation and crisis. Across southern and eastern India, resistance to Hindi imposition and centralised power is growing. His vision of Hindu nationalist unity is increasingly met with regional rebellion and demands for autonomy.
This visit could have been more. It could have been a template for how a plural state welcomes a controversial leader without losing its soul. It could have said: here, we have no election violence. Here, there is peaceful transfer of power. Here, we do not chant for men. We sing for country. Here, men are not lynched for eating beef. Modi may have learned from us.
There was one moment of quiet dignity. President Christine Kangaloo, in an elegant western dress representative of who we all are at work, gracefully bestowed Trinidad and Tobago’s highest honour, the Order of the Republic, on Prime Minister Modi. She was neither performative, nor pandering, but poised.
So in Hindi, I told Modi my father was a soldier. He leaned in on respect. I took that selfie. I had a right to be there, is what I was saying with that image. I am the daughter of a plural India — of a Muslim woman of Afghan lineage and a Hindu soldier. I come from Bangalore, Simla and Aligarh; from London, Toronto, Scarborough, and Port of Spain. I carry in my blood the butchered millions — Hindus and Muslims who turned on one another during Partition, when a nation was cleaved not only by borders, but by grief.
At a celebration last week for the novelist Earl Lovelace’s 90th birthday, his son Che recalled being told as a child of mixed race: You are both. My family, over the years, has become part of the nation’s psyche, interwoven in the scars and legacies of India, Africa, China, Syria, and Europe.
I stood in parliament not to forget, but to face all of it. I, like many of us, have always existed on the margin — a South Asian woman shaped by contradiction — Muslim and Hindu, centre-stage and peripheral, seen and unseen. A Kashmiri by metaphor, not by blood: claimed and disowned, suspended between worlds. But in these islands, so have we all. We claim all of it.
This is not an inheritance of loss. In this fractured and reassembled world, it is an inheritance of gain. It’s a pity we did not show this to our honoured guest. [Global Voices/VP]