By Paras Ramoutar, IANS
Port of Spain : Trinidad and Tobago, a country with a large Indian-origin population, will be going to the polls on Nov 5.
Announcing the dissolution of Parliament Friday midnight, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Patrick Manning said that the general elections would be held on Nov 5 to elect the country’s ninth parliament.
Some 960,000 electors, of which 50 percent are young people, will be eligible to vote for members in the House of Representatives, which now has 41 seats instead of the previous 36.
There are around 520,000 Indian-origin people in this country with a million-strong population. Most of them are descendants of Indians who had come to the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work in the sugarcane plantations here.
The ruling People’s National Movement (PNM) led by Manning, a geologist, along with the opposition United National Congress-Alliance (UNC-A) led by former prime minister of Indian-origin Basdeo Panday, and the newly-formed Congress of the People (COP) led by former deputy prime minister and Central Bank governor Winston Dookeran, also of Indian origin, will be contesting the polls.
Trinidad and Tobago obtained independence from Britain on Aug 31, 1962 with the British queen’s representative becoming president. It has a bicameral parliamentary system – the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Prime Minister Manning had announced last week that a team of observers from the Caribbean Community (Caricom), an economic bloc of the region, would be invited to oversee the elections.