The full article is called "Democracy - Defiled, defaced and Damned! Our world in peril!
I have extracted the part pertaining to Fiji. Read on ....
Where does Fiji stand in this global imbroglio? This is an irrelevant question. Fiji has been in this game long before the emergence of the digital frontier and the historians, for inexplicable reasons, failed to reveal the perpetrators.
At the heart of it were the chiefs who harvested wealth, power and glory from two streams – traditional and political. It involved massive manipulation of the minds of commoner Itaukeis just before the 1963 election. This was the first election when the Itaukeis and women were granted the right to vote. Before it, the Itaukeis representation came through nomination, largely of chiefs, from the Great Council of Chiefs and the Governor.
Throughout history, the chiefs opposed voting rights to their people, as they felt it was below their dignity to beg for votes from their commoner subjects who increasingly came to accept the status quo that only the chiefs could represent them.
However, the chiefs couldn’t resist the granting of voting rights to the commoners any longer, as the bells tolled for Fiji’s impending independence. So, in 1963, the chiefs invented the heinous weapon of racism and concocted a plan to create anger, hatred and fear to hoodwink the commoner Itaukeis into believing that the Indians posed a grave threat to their land ownership, culture, customs and customary rights and that they had to elect them to fight the Indian menace. It worked for them; as the fearful Itaukeis voted for them en masse to secure themselves from the so-called Indian menace.
Subsequently, it became the established pattern for winning successive elections, leaving the hapless Indians in a pitiable condition to become the most despised community in Fiji.
They bore their pain and suffering in silence, living in hope draped in despair. This cycle ended in 2006 but does rear its ugly head just before every election (2014, 2018) but, following the dissolution of the Great Council of Chiefs in 2012, the appeal to racial unity has considerably eased. Hopefully, it is insignificant during 2022 and on the way out though it would take many more years to be eliminated.
Overall, authoritarianism has been in the blood of Fiji politics; its strain is becoming stronger and ominous. Its electoral system has entered the digital era. NADRA, Pakistan’s National Database Registration Agency was contracted in 2017 to implement an election management system for the 2018 election in Fiji. It has a shady past, alleged to have issued false Pakistani identity cards to terrorists and other miscreants and shown low respect for morals, ethics and integrity but the 2018 Fiji election passed without any major controversy.
However, the people and authorities need to be ‘digitally’ knowledgeable, aware and alert to capture any malfeasance during the 2022 election.
** Rajendra Prasad is the former Town Clerk of Ba and author of Tears in Paradise – Suffering andStruggles of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004 (2004) and Enslaved in Paradise – A History of Mammoth Betrayals of Fijians by the British, Chiefs and Leaders of Fiji 1876-2006. The views expressed are not necessarily of this publication but that of the author alone.
Related Our land is safe ‘Don’t Fear Land Law’ (fijisun.com.fj)
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