Professor Brij Lal was an international academic with a unique contribution to Fiji’s political development. He was no doubt strongly influenced by two of Fiji’s greatest Indo-Fijian leaders whose biographies Brij wrote: the late AD Patel and the late Jai Ram Reddy.
Brij’s two biographies
PROF Lal’s first biography was of the late AD Patel, the outstanding progressive leader of the National Federation Party, whose work was central to driving Fiji to independence in 1970, although he passed away just prior to it. The thoughts and policies advocated by Mr Patel were so progressive, profound and ahead of his time, that they inevitably had an impact on Prof Lal’s own thinking and later contributions to the Reeves Commission Report. The second biography is that of the late Jai Ram Reddy, also a Leader of the National Federation Party, who nominated Prof Lal as his representative to the Reeves Commission. Mr Reddy was central to the co-operation with Rabuka and the approval of the 1997 Constitution by both Houses of Parliament. It was no secret that Prof Lal was a fervent supporter of Mr Reddy and had high hopes for the success of the NFP in the 1999 Elections, sadly not to be. As Prof Lal writes in his contribution to Serendipity: “I also became a participant historian, and so I have remained, living inside my history, not outside or above it. I recognize the dangers in my position, but it is better to be open about where one stands on critical issues than feign objectivity where none exists. Sometimes, it becomes necessary to show one’s hand rather than point a finger from the sidelines. Silence is not an option.” I would echo Prof Lal’s sentiments having also been invited by the late Mr Reddy to serve in the Fiji Parliament between 1996 and 1999, during which period we approved the 1997 Constitution.
Fiji’s constitutional development
Between 1995 and 1996, Brij was the nominee of the Opposition Leader the late Mr Reddy on the Reeves Commission, alongside Sir Paul Reeves (former NZ Governor General) and Tom Vakatora (senior Alliance politician and minister of various portfolios and nominee of Prime Minister Rabuka). There is no better person to describe Prof Lal’s contribution to the Commission’s work than Jon Apted who had been one of the legal counsels to the Commission and later became a principal for the well-known Law firm of Munro Leys. Mr Apted wrote (DevPolicyBlog 28 January 2022): “Brij approached the task with the utmost dedication and the open mind of an academic. He listened carefully to the people. He questioned the experts closely, and he began to see things differently from how he had seen them when he started. Sir Paul recognised early on that Brij and Mr Vakatora were proxies for the Indian and Fijian communities, and any accommodation between the communities had to begin with Brij and Mr Vakatora. Brij recognised this too, as did Mr Vakatora, eventually. A close friendship slowly developed, and over the course of our travels, hearings, and the many meetings, each came to see the perspectives and the fears and hopes of the other community as real and deserving of respect. It is fair to say that Brij was the one who brought the energy and academic rigour to the Commission’s deliberations, and his tenacity and enthusiasm must be credited with moving Mr Vakatora to the middle ground represented by the Commission’s report. Brij scrutinised our drafts closely, suggesting or demanding rewrites where I was not able to capture the essence of an idea as eloquently as he would have”. The 1997 Constitution was largely based on the Reeves Report with the exception that based on the NFP suggestion (and pushed by yours truly), the Fiji Parliament inserted the requirement for a Multi-Party Government whereby any party that obtained 10 per cent of the seats was entitled to be invited into Cabinet. We had hoped that this measure would end adversarial politics of elections and guarantee Indo-Fijian representation in Cabinet. The 1997 Constitution was passed by both Houses of Parliament and became law. Unfortunately, no one envisaged at that time how a small change of the electoral system could lead to a catastrophic result for Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and more importantly for his SVT Party which was wiped out barely making 8 seats, though that entitled them to be invited into Cabinet.
Sadly, the Multiparty Cabinet provision was not put into practice by the 1999 Chaudhry Government, Mr Rabuka went from “hero to zero” (in his own words to me). The SVT never forgave Mr Rabuka for his magnanimous gesture of co-operation with Mr Reddy and he was soon replaced as leader of SVT by Ratu Inoke Kubuabola. Though never publicly expressed, I feel that Mr Rabuka and the SVT felt betrayed by the Reeves Commission. They had never expected such an election result which wiped them out despite their generosity towards the Opposition NFP. With a proportional electoral system, SVT would have had far more than 15 seats and NFP would easily have had many seats in Parliament. The 2000 coup occurred not long after with leading politicians from the SVT active behind the scene, the truth still not revealed until today. The Multi-Party Cabinet was unfortunately also not implemented by the first elected Laisenia Qarase SDL Government after the 2001 Elections. When it was eventually implemented by Mr Qarase after the 2006 elections, Mr Chaudhry ominously stayed out of the SDL-FLP Cabinet which was soon deposed by the Bainimarama coup. Mr Chaudhry joined that Bainimarama Military Government soon after as Minister of Finance, although he did not last long.
A minor disagreement with major personal consequence
In this personal account of Prof Lal, it would be remiss of me if I did not mention our major 1996 disagreement over desirable electoral systems for Fiji, unfortunately souring our relations thereafter, probably because of my intemperate choice of words. Having worked and written on the problems of Fiji’s electoral systems for years, my personal opinion was that the electoral system recommended by the Reeves Commission (the Alternative Vote System with First Past the Post) had one major flaw: it was not proportional and any party which failed to get 50 per cent or more in any one of the seats would never make it into Parliament even if it had a large share of national votes. I had tried hard to convince Prof Brij (who was then often staying at my home) of better systems such as the NZ one. But the Reeves Commission followed other advice from Australian “experts”. I wrote about these weaknesses and suggested improvements even before Parliament had passed the 19997 Constitution: “The Constitution Review Commission Report: sound principles but weak advice on electoral system”. The Fiji Times, November 1, 1996. And “The Constitution Review Commission Report: Fijians lose in a bad government”. The Fiji Times, November 2, 1996. These two articles are in my eBook Volume 3 of Community Education Books (Our Struggles for Democracy in Fiji: Rule of Law and Media Freedom). Unfortunately, I undiplomatically wrote that the Reeves Commission “stuffed up on the electoral system”. Offended by my language, Prof Brij wrote a letter of complaint to the Editor of Fiji Times, and never forgave me thereafter. It did not help that my criticisms were vindicated in the first elections in 1999 under that AV system. Mr Reddy’s Opposition party, the NFP (including me) was also totally wiped out when a proportional system would have guaranteed the NFP a reasonable number of seats. Disappointing to me also was that Prof Brij never acknowledged afterwards that the electoral system was a weakness in their report and could have been easily remedied with a few simple changes such as introducing proportionality with an Open or Close List system for half the MPs, and half elected in local constituencies. The great historical irony is that it has been the FijiFirst Party’s 2013 Constitution which has brought in a proportional Open List system except it cunningly stipulates just one national constituency to suit their grand strategy of using Mr Bainimarama as the national vote getter. Nevertheless, I believe that an expert judicial review of the 2013 Constitution will establish its fundamental illegality, and the 1997 Constitution based on the Report by Sir Paul Reeves Prof Lal and Tomasi Vakatora, will be found to be still the lawful constitution for today.
Contrasting two historians
The contributions of Prof Lal can be better understood by comparing his record with that of the other leading historian of Fiji, the late Dr Ahmed Ali who worked in Fiji all his life (and whose career I describe in an earlier reading). They were both descendants of the girmitiya and both did their PhD from ANU. They both worked at the University of the South Pacific where Prof Lal was a stellar student and graduate, earning umpteen gold medals. But they followed totally different constitutional paths. Dr Ahmed chose to work with coup leaders and served in their governments. Prof Lal was implacably opposed to military coups which he saw as undermining democracy, the rule of law and basic human rights and spoke out in the region. He eventually paid a price for that principled stance. It is ironic that they were both shunned by mainstream Indo-Fijian communities: Dr Ali was largely in tune with the Muslim community which supported Ratu Mara and his Alliance Government in a period when most Indo-Fijians supported the National Federation Party; and Prof Lal was implacably opposed to the Bainimarama Government which had committed treason against the lawful Qarase Government, but was also supported by the majority of Indo-Fijians. Despite the fact that Prof Lal was the most illustrious of descendants of the girmitiyas, when he was banned from Fiji there were no protests from the Indo-Fiji organisations like Arya Samaj, Sanatan Dharm and Fiji Muslim League; nor from senior influential academics like Professor Satendra Nandan and Professor Subramani who have also been passionate about the glorious heritage left in Fiji by the girmitiyas, but collaborated with the Bainimarama Government. Neither did any of the Gujarati organisations protested about one their most illustrious and pioneering daughters (Padma Narsey Lal) being banned from her country of birth for the “crime” of being the partner of Prof Lal, a moderate critic of Government. Padma has also served on the Board of the Gujarati Education Society as their Vice President. Nor were there any protests from Rotary Suva Branch of which she was the president elect at the time of her banning. Sadly, the USP Alumni organisation did not keep their protests burning at this shameful treatment of arguably their two most illustrious alumni. In the USP 50th anniversary publication supposedly authored by a historian and former USP history/politics academic who has a chapter in Prof Lal’s edited book Serendipity, there is not even a mention of the Bainimarama Government’s ban of Prof Brij and Padma from Fiji, or USP’s censorship of senior academics and students.
It should be recorded however that there were some brave prominent persons (some early supporters of Bainimarama) who pleaded with him at the end of October 2016 to lift the ban on Prof Lal and Padma. They were Professor Vijay Naidu, Tessa MacKenzie, Rev. Akuila Yabaki, Shamima Ali, Dr Tupeni Baba, Dr Morgan Tui, Dr Claire Slatter, Dr Ganesh Chand, Professor Satish Chand and Professor Croz Walsh. All these pleas were to no avail.
Suffering exile
Max Quanchi wrote: “Brij was also a patriot — he never stopped talking about and worrying about Fiji. It was an enormous travesty of justice for a boy from the cane fields, a USP graduate and a proud Fijian to be exiled from his homeland for an innocuous comment in a radio interview”. But of course his banning from Fiji was not just because of an “innocuous comment”. It was because of his implacable opposition to the illegal Bainimarama Government and the fact that Prof Lal’s comments were held in the highest of regard by governments and media in Australia and NZ. It must be extremely difficult to understand fully the extent that Prof Lal felt the pain of forced exile – of not being able to return to the land of his birth because of the Bainimarama ban, despite his enormous academic and political contributions. The ban also had a significant impact on Padma’s regional work which often depended on travel through Fiji and she soon stopped doing that. I have personally also felt Prof Lal’s pain of exile. Because of the Bainimarama Government’s financial pressure on USP, I had lost my USP professorial job and also the research and consultancy opportunities with the Fiji Bureau of Statistics, eventually also forcing me to move to Australia in 2016. The experience of waking every day in Melbourne and first reading what is happening in Fiji before doing the other mundane things of life is not to be recommended to anyone. Of course, it did not help if one’s academic work continued to be focussed on Fiji, as mine and Prof Lal’s were. Frequently, the work would consist of revising work covering four decades of Fiji’s stumbling history and revisiting all the trauma of previous decades.
An early social annoyance
No academic ever lives or works in a social vacuum and Prof Lal’s accounts of his personal journey do not mention one painful social obstacle he and Padma had to overcome early on in their relationship, with Padma being Gujarati and he a Hindustani. His international colleagues would be surprised at this social tension, given that both were born in Fiji and both would be classified as “Indo-Fijians” or Fiji-Indians. In my Volume 4 eBook are some of my articles exploring the unpleasant ignored racisms in Fiji’s society, not just that between the indigenous Fijians (iTaukei) and Indo-Fijians (the hobbyhorse of political writers on Fiji’s coups) but also the totally neglected internal Indo-Fijian racisms, such as between Gujarati and Hindustani, North and South Indians, the Hindu castes divides, and even within Gujarati castes (such as between khatri, chamaars, dhobi) — all of which tensions even most indigenous Fijians have no idea of. My Gujarati Rajput (dhobi) parents happily married off three of my siblings to their Gujarati Rajput partners (including two sisters from India) in grand weddings at Suva’s Khatri Hall with their whole community invited. But my parents were not comfortable with Padma’s chosen life partner, Prof Lal, who she married in a small mandir in Vancouver where Brij was studying and where our oldest brother stood in for our parents. My parents were also not comfortable with my marrying my Fiji Chinese partner. I waited for ten years to marry in a registry office in Hove, United Kingdom. To save my parents some social discomfort, I declined my parents’ offer of a Khatri Hall wedding when we returned to Fiji, with one kid in tow. Nevertheless, within just a few years, our parents to their credit had progressed enough to marry off another of their daughters to a Punjabi boy from Canada, also done grandly in Khatri Hall, regardless of the wagging tongues. Not too long after that our parents travelled to Vancouver to marry off another young sister to a white Australian-British fellow Cambridge student. Unfortunately, these social attitudes by our parents led to a less than warm relationship and tensions between Prof Lal and Padma’s family and my parents, for quite a few years. Time of course healed most wounds though not all. Eventually, I saw no difference in my parents’ love and affection for all their grandchildren and great grandchildren with a kaleidoscope of origins – Gujarati, Hindustani, Chinese, Punjabi, English, Scottish, Australian, and German. Our family trend towards globalisation were soon followed by other Gujaratis and Hindustanis in Fiji.
The family perspective: Niraj and Yogi’s words
Perhaps the memories of perceptive but critical children can often be quite revealing. Niraj and Yogi have incredibly powerful memories of their father, both academically and also in the mundane activities fathers (and grandfathers) engage in as part of every day living: sports, cooking, and the telling of stories. Niraj said at the funeral: “Dad’s head was often in a history book, or newspaper, or literary magazine — and he taught us to appreciate these things, but also the value of stories and fables and fiction, some ancient, some made up — all with a lesson or moral, or something to learn.
Dad taught us the value and power of critical thinking and being unafraid to voice an opinion His passion about Fiji and the Indian indentured experience was obvious. What resonated with us, perhaps even more strongly, were his and mum’s principles of standing up for what you believe to be right and not faltering. Niraj and Yogi gave the example of: “Mum and dad printing pro-democracy pamphlets during the 1987 coup and delivering them across Suva with 10-year-old me in the backseat of their Datsun.” What I remember also was our joint USP staff and student protests at the USP Pool, against the expulsion of Theo McDonald (a Marxist Professor of Mathematics) from Fiji by banning him from returning from Australia after he had gone with his daughter for medical treatment. Professor MacDonald (who was then also supervising my Masters degree in Mathematics, aborted thereafter) had also initiated the pamphlet protests in which Prof Lal and Padma were also involved in. These pamphlets anonymously scattered around Suva, publicised the manslaughter of a pedestrian cut down in Nasinu by a ministerial car which drove on to Nausori to catch a flight, and left that injured pedestrian to die. There was then a very active Special Branch of CID which used to follow all the radical staff at USP. Padma related at Brij’s funeral: “He was a friend, a soul mate, a good husband, a good father, and a doting Nanna/Aaja to our grandchildren. As partners in life, we shared common core values of things like respect, principled living and doing what is right and just for all around us. I was always free to pursue my passion, my interests and what I believed was right, even if that meant I was juggling these with the demands of children. I must say, we did not know about equal parenting then.” Undoubtedly, Prof Lal and other male professionals of that era (including myself) were fortunate to have wives who were working professionals in their own right, while carrying a heavier share of the responsibilities of caring for the family.
Continued academic service to the Pacific
The professional lives of Prof Lal (and Padma) had mostly revolved around subjects of relevance to Fiji and Oceania, resulting in a massive accumulation of documents, publications and books acquired over half a century. As Prof Lal (and Padma) got nearer to retirement they firmly decided that their collections should be accessible to current and future Pacific scholars rather than collecting dust in family homes. But their experience with donations to USP and Fiji National University libraries were not what they expected given the paucity of such original material in Fiji. They explored informally about gifting Brij’s books to USP Library, but they could not come to any arrangement especially as USP Library did not have a policy of personal archives. They then approached the Fiji National University which accepted hundreds of Prof Lal’s Fiji and Pacific history/politics books, as well as many of Padma’s books and reports covering environment management, climate change, and disaster risk management in the Pacific. Unfortunately, they found several years later that when Dr Ganesh Chand parted company with FNU, he took their collections with him to the global Girmit Institute where he created a Brij and Padma Lal Collection. The latest they heard was of minimal usage because of staffing constraints as well as lack of student demand for written materials (a problem for all universities globally). When Prof Lal passed away, Padma contacted several Fiji libraries again. USP Library decided to only take books that Prof Lal had authored or edited, to distribute to other USP libraries in Fiji and the region. Padma’s resource and environment management publications on Fiji and the Pacific were also accepted. In 2023, the Vice Chancellor of
Solomon Islands National University (Dr Transform Aqorau) accepted their books into a Brij Lal Collection which Prof Lal and Padma were quite happy about because of their friendships with many Solomon Island students at USP in the early seventies. Interestingly, I had also donated all my books and manuscripts To Fiji National University because I felt that USP Library was already well endowed. From there a lot of my books (and bookshelves) travelled on to University of Fiji. This is a pattern that many international academics from Fiji are following and will no doubt continue to follow with their large collections of books and manuscripts.
Brij’s return to Tabia
This account would not be complete if one did not describe the incredible spectacle of the return of Prof Lal’s ashes with Padma, Niraj, and Yogi to Fiji, previously denied by the Bainimarama Government. This was at the invitation of the new Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka who formally apologised to Prof Lal and his family for his banishment by the Bainimarama regime. The entire ceremony was organised by the National Federation Party led by Professor Biman Prasad (Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister). The spectacular footage with drone cameras following the group to the scattering of Prof Lal’s ashes in Tabia River can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/nfpfiji/ videos/prof-brij-lal-homecominginterment/908608723513995/ Is may be serendipity that the current (2024) Coalition Government of Sitiveni Rabuka and Professor Biman Prasad may be seen as a “Multi-Party Government” and partnership of the two major ethnic groups in Fiji that was the vision of the late Mr Reddy and Mr Rabuka in 1997. It is not serendipity that Prof Lal was a friend of the National Federation Party and its two great leaders, the late Mr Patel and the late Mr Reddy. Prof Lal was also of course a friend of “fellow Labasia” Professor Biman Prasad, the current leader of the NFP. The end is not the end According to the article by Prof Lal’s children Niraj and Yogi in Serendipity, Brij wrote in “My Girmit Yatra” (My Girmit journey): “My past is now truly past; it is rapidly becoming a foreign country. The caravan is moving on, as it must. I myself will soon become a permanent resident, if not already a citizen, of the Independent Republic of the Genre of Faction in the Commonwealth of Creative Non-Fiction …. It is time to let go, time for new leaves to sprout and come into light. I do not regret the impending end of my long journey; I rejoice that it happened at all”. What more can any academic ask, anywhere?
- PROF WADAN NARSEY is one of the region’s senior economists and a regular commentator on political and economic issues in Fiji. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times.
