Against communalism of the best-loser system - Lalit Mauritius

We also have to oppose racism. We have to expose the past exploitation and oppression of
slavery and indenture. We have to expose present exploitation of wage labour. We have to see
where our feelings of anguish, insecurity, pain actually come from. Insecurity at work, lack of
democracy in the economy, over-crowding in housing, fear of not getting a good school, fear of
not getting good health care, compulsory overtime, low wages. These are the real sources. And
they are the legacy of a cruel colonial and capitalist economy.
It is important to remember the facts. There are many poor and powerless people in the working
classes in Mauritius. From the barren hillsides where the Vallee Pitot “ti-marsan” live, to the
poverty-stricken areas in Kan Yolof and Ros Bwa, from the forgotten Dan Kan, and generalized
rural poverty to the overcrowding in sité houses. You have just to know the wages in the free
zone, for agricultural labourers, for domestic workers, to know how much poverty there is in
Mauritius. It cuts right across society: over half of Mauritians live under the poverty datum line.
This is unacceptable.
Worse still. In the face of this, there is massive wealth. A few hundred families still control most
of the land, the sugar mills, and most of the capital in tourism, industry, commerce, insurance
and banking, import-export, and control all private sector top jobs. The Government has
privatized the little common property there was, and is further privatizing. There has been a mad
“scramble” for the newly privatized means of production; and it is this scramble that has made
and is continuing to make all forms of communalism go beserk.
There are whole social classes that cry out for “equality”. There are political currents that are
working for equality for everyone. We are amongst those.
There are also some ambitious petty-bourgeois individuals and groups that want to pull
themselves and their clans up into the bourgeoisie. They make cynical use of the genuine
exploitation and oppression of the working people to build up tensions; then they cleverly offer
a way out of conflict: nominations for themselves, money for their organizations, tenders for
their clans, etc. This is an age-old dynamic.
But a very dangerous one.
We can halt it. Our power to halt it lies in the fact that it inevitably leans on communal
classification. We can, like the Redacteur en Chef did in 1968, resolve not to go on with the
infernal process of classification and categorization. But this alone is not enough.
In order to make progress, we will have at the same time as we oppose community
consciousness, to take the political decision to work towards “equality” and not just towards
redistributing inequality by proportional representation. (How absurd to demand the same
number of homeless in each “community”, same number of prisoners in each “community”,
same number of over-paid employees in each “community”, same number of tablisman owners
in each “community”, same number of labourers in each “community”, same number of
unemployed in each “community”.)
We must demand nothing less than equality.
And then we have a choice as to what to celebrate about life. We have the choice: we can
choose to celebrate our universal “humanity”, and work for the good of the whole of humanity.
We have the choice as to whether to contribute our effort, part of our income, our time, our love
and care to non-communal organizations and activities -- or not.
We have to make this choice.
MAC Sub-Committee on Best Loser and Classification
October, 1995
(Prior to the Supreme Court judgement
on the question of oriental languages and ranking
which led to the recent crisis.)