Against communalism of the best-loser system - Lalit Mauritius

will not be considered for such allocation, should the candidates be entitled to the same. The
Commission will carry out the exercise as spelt out in the First Schedule and it will be up to the
candidates to decide what stand they will adopt.”
But, Justice Seetulsingh has only addressed one half – the smaller half – of the problem: if we
are not elected but get sufficient votes to qualify for a communal Best Loser seat. Then, our
letter, he advises the Electoral Supervisory Commission, is binding. Much more important than
this is another issue – one which proves that the communal classification in the Best Loser
system in fact infects the entire system, and that ALL members of the National Assembly are
communally classified in order to name the eight Best Losers on the basis of community.
After attempting to give redress for “upsetting the proper allocation of best loser seats”, the
Supreme Court judgment will, as we will show, risk, if used as a guideline in the future lead to
even more “upsetting the proper allocation of best loser seats”, within the logic of the system,
iniquitous as this logic may be. Let us explain.
We go back to the earlier sentence: Imagine for a minute if all or most of the 20 Lalit and Nuvo
Lizur candidates who were brought before the Supreme Court and re-classified had, in fact, been
elected.
All of them are now reclassified by the Supreme Court as being members of the “G….P….”
Then, once the Electoral Supervisory Commission sits down after elections to work out the best
losers, this classification would be brought out along with all the other elected members’
communal auto-classification. Because there is a block of “G… P…” members elected (all the
Lalit and Nuvo Lizur candidates having been thus re-classified and subsequently elected), this
means that there will be fewer “G…. P….” best losers for the rest of the candidates than if we
had been left with “random” communities we attributed to ourselves through the drawing of
lots. Thus the “proper allocation” (within the awful logic of the communal best loser system)
would be even more upset by the Judgment than it could possibly have been by our action of
drawing lots.
The reason for this strange state of affairs is two-fold.
First “community”, as we know it in Mauritius, is no more than a “shared set of prejudices” reinforced
every time there is a General Election. That is to say, “community” only exists as an
ideological construct, except at the moment of self-classification or of classification by the
Supreme Court, when it becomes a kind of “bureacratic fact”.
Second, the fourth community, the “G…. P….” is both a “residual community” and also, at the
same time, entitled to best loser representatives “properly allocated”. This implies two opposite
types of nature: first, that the G…. P…. is “all the rest” meaning almost the opposite of “a
community”, and also that any one Member of the National Assembly who is a “member of the
“G…. P….” can represent x number of people of the “G… P….” (as a proportion from the 1972
Census) as if the “G…. P….” was a homogenous community, once calculations are done under
the procedures of the First Schedule.
These two representations in set theory models would be as follows:
4 Communities for definition of “community”. 4 Communities for allocation of seats
Here is the difficulty that arises from this major flaw in the system: Lalit and Nouvo Lizour
have no undertaking not to take up ELECTED seats. On the contrary, we will obviously accept
them. That is why we stand for election: in order to be elected. But these elected Members of
the National Assembly of Lalit and Nouvo Lizour are also classified communally for the
exercise of the best loser allocation for eight other candidates.
Note, that, as if to make this point clear to everyone, the Constitution demands that ALL
candidates, including independent candidates, declare a “community” on their Nomination
Papers, even though independents do not themselves qualify to be nominated Best Losers. This
is because if one or more independents were actually elected (i.e. not just potential best losers)
they would be included in the calculations on which the eight best losers are done.