Against communalism of the best-loser system - Lalit Mauritius

General Population. We call ourselves by the insulting terms: “blacks” or “whites”; we
categorize ourselves “Hindus” or “Catholics”, right outside the domain of religious practices;
we say, these are “Mozambiques”, these are “Muslims”, these are “Maraz”, these are
“Mulattoes”, these are “Marathis”; these are “Kreols”, these are “Europeans”, these are
“Tamils”, these are “Christians” -- as if we had brand-marks burnt into our arms by slavetraders,
slave-owners and indentured labour merchants. And sometimes the terms become those
of abuse: “malbar”, “laskar”, “mazambik”, “lera blan”, “nwar fam”, “ferblan”, “chamar”. We
know we insult ourselves by this classification. We know that our humanity is what unites us:
the scientifically verifiable fact that we are all humans beings.
But this knowledge is not enough to make communalism evaporate.
Facts have difficulty establishing themselves against ideology, if the ideology is re-invented
every minute of every hour of every day. For example, class realities that re-impose their
objective proofs of actual existence on us every day, cannot, on their own, wipe out communal
ideology. The fact that the rich all have one rather similar way of life, and the poor another is
eminently verifiable. Any creature from outer space could see it.
In Mauritius there are not even geographically defined “communities”, where boundaries are
historically physical. And yet there is the ideology of communities. Nor does language define
“community”. There are different languages spoken within one “community”, or the same
language shared between different “communities”. This does not weaken the ideology of
communities.
We may ask ourselves how this is so. How can an ideological construct be stronger than reality?
Everyone knows that history is full of examples that show the tenacity of ideology -- precisely
because we all re-produce it constantly ourselves, re-invent it in our daily lives. Even though it
is destructive.
Everyone also realizes the dangers of communalism.
We all have access to television and radio, and we all know how communalism has exploded
whole peoples into senseless, futile civil war -- from Rwanda to the Lebanon, from India to
Ireland, from ex-Yugoslavia to Algeria. People are forced into a classification, and then asked to
act from “within” this category. And even faced with a similar spectre before our very eyes in
Mauritius, we continue to reproduce the very ideology that can lead, under certain
circumstances, so inexorably to our own downfall.
Politics: Community and communalism
Immediately before Independence, all the political parties on the scene believed in community
and in communalism.
They saw these two words, “community” and “communalism”, quite accurately, as part of the
same thing.
All the parties of that time believed in the “reality” of community. Party leaders even saw
advantage in it. They saw that the delicate balance of economic and class forces would change
around the time of Independence -- creating the ideal moment in which political opportunists
could get busy propagating ideas about community and communalism, that would help them
“get an advantage” (usually a direct economic advantage for their clan) in the change in the
balance of class forces.
There are two things to remember about communalism: “Communalism” is always “in selfdefence”,
of course. There is no communalism which is not “in self-defence”. “Communalism”
always has some direct short-term potential economic beneficiary, of course; there is no
“innocent” communalism.
The Advance Group, which in fact did a full-scale takeover of the Labour Party, portrayed itself
as representing “the Indo-Mauritian Community”; it described how this “community” had been
held down by racism and anti-immigrant ideology. A glance at the Advance Statutes makes it
quite clear that what the Advance Group really represented was an upwardly mobile petty
bourgeoisie that had been blocked by British colonial policies from ascending the professional
and white collar ladders, and blocked by a powerful oligarchy and old commercial bourgeoisie
from ascending the capitalist ladders. Rather more to do with class than community.
The PMSD vacillated between pretending to represent “all the minorities” and contenting itself
with pretending to represent “the Kreol community”. The PMSD was actually against
Independence, because this threatened the existing economic scheme of things, and the role of
the PMSD in aggravating communal consciousness and in stirring up friction has always been
known to have been suspect. The PMSD portrayed all “Mauriciens” as being threatened by a