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The NFP delegation in London; courtesy of the late Karam Chand Ramrakha
Biman Prasad’s latest lecture on Indo-Fijian population decline is vintage NFP theatre. It is high on indignation, low on self-awareness. He accuses Opposition Leader Inia Seruiratu of “playing politics” with demographics, blames falling birth rates and migration, and insists the downward trend started long before he entered politics.
For once, he’s telling the truth but not in the way he thinks. The real story of Indo-Fijian decline is not just a tale of statistics. It’s a history of betrayal, cowardice and structural failure, much of it authored by the very political tradition Biman Prasad now leads.
London, 1970: NFP’s Original Sin and Temptation of Power
Let’s start at the beginning. At the 1970 London constitutional talks, the National Federation Party, hailed then as the voice of Indo-Fijians, capitulated. Instead of fighting for a democratic, non-racial order, they accepted a deal that entrenched communal seats, guaranteed chiefly veto power, and structurally locked Indo-Fijians out of full political equality.
And they did so while ignoring every demographic warning before them. Constitutional advisers at the time (including my own former academic supervisor the late Sir David Butler - real SIR, no manorial purchase of the title from an auction house) pointed out that the Indo-Fijian share of the population would begin to decline within a generation but NFP leaders signed away safeguards anyway. They came home with a flag, not a future.
That betrayal was the foundation stone of our political vulnerability. And it’s a vulnerability that has shaped every crisis since.
1987: Rabuka Turns a Problem Into a Catastrophe
If 1970 was the betrayal, 1987 was the hammer blow. Sitiveni Rabuka’s racist military coups, openly justified as a defence of “indigenous supremacy”, were a body blow to Indo-Fijian security and confidence. Families that had called Fiji home for generations suddenly found themselves treated as outsiders in their own country.
Tens of thousands fled. Teachers, doctors, engineers, business owners, the very backbone of the Indo-Fijian community, migrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and beyond. Many never returned. Rabuka’s coups didn’t just topple the Bavadra government; they shattered a community’s belief that it could ever belong.
And while Prasad likes to recite migration statistics as though they were inevitable, he rarely mentions that this mass exodus was not a natural demographic trend. It was a direct result of calculated political racism.
2006–2014: Bainimarama’s Attempt and the Continuing Exodus
Even the Bainimarama government, for all its authoritarian flaws, recognised the injustice and tried to reverse it. By enshrining equal and common citizenship in the 2013 Constitution, Bainimarama tore up the colonial-era racial labels and declared, for the first time, that every citizen was simply a “Fijian”.
But even that bold step could not undo decades of structural damage. By then, the Indo-Fijian diaspora was established, and many who had left were never coming back. Worse, young Indo-Fijians inside Fiji continued to see no real future in a country where political leaders, including Prasad’s current coalition partners, still wink at ethno-nationalism and glorify Rabuka as a “statesman.”
The exodus didn’t slow. In fact, in many ways, it deepened.
Biman Prasad’s Crocodile Tears
And so we come to Biman Prasad, standing on a shrinking political platform, lamenting a demographic reality his party helped create and successive governments failed to stop. He points fingers at Bainimarama for Brij Lal’s exile. He scolds Seruiratu for “politicising” the numbers. But he refuses to confront the uncomfortable truth:
A Future Squandered
The Indo-Fijian story could have been one of confident nation-building. Instead, it is a story of permanent second-class status, political betrayal, and now, demographic disappearance. And the bitter irony is that Biman Prasad, who today clutches his pearls over shrinking numbers, leads the same party that signed our future away 55 years ago.
If he truly wants to honour Indo-Fijians, he should stop playing the helpless academic and start telling the truth: our decline was not inevitable. It was engineered by colonial compromise, by coup-era racism, and by the political cowardice of leaders who still refuse to apologise.
The Last Word for NFP leader Biman Prasad
So here’s a message for the NFP leader Biman Prasad: Indo-Fijians don’t need lectures. They need accountability. They need leaders willing to confront the betrayal of 1970, condemn the crimes of 1987, and finally deliver the security that even Bainimarama’s reforms could not guarantee.
Until then, his tears over demographic decline are just that - tears. And history will record that when the Indo-Fijian community needed courage, the NFP gave them compromise. When they needed protection, they got platitudes.
And when they needed a future, they got a footnote.
The NFP delegation returned from London with a constitution that was less a social contract than a surrender document. The party's failure in 1970 was not just seats and constitutions. It was about vision, or rather, the lack of it. Instead of imaging a Fiji where citizenship trumped ethnicity, they opted for communal compartments and colonial compromises. Instead of future-proofing Indo-Fijian rights against demographic shifts, they gambled everything on static population ratios.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation, and its consequences are now irreversible.
So when Biman Prasad blames migration or fertility rates, he's only telling half the story. Yes, Indo-Fijians left in droves because they were made to feel they had no stake in a system stacked against them from the start. Yes, many had fewer children because they saw no future in a state that structurally diminished their voice.
And who built that state?
It wasn't Frank Bainimarama. It wasn't Inia Seruiratu. It wasn't even Sitiveni Rabuka. It was the NFP's London delegation in 1970 - Prasad's politicial ancestors - who sold our community's constitutional future for a Union Jack handover ceremony and a few polite handshakes in Whitehall.
So yes, former professor of statistics, the numbers don't lie. But neither does history. And history will record that long before Indo-Fijians began leaving Fiji, the NFP leadership left them behind in London in 1970.
For once, he’s telling the truth but not in the way he thinks. The real story of Indo-Fijian decline is not just a tale of statistics. It’s a history of betrayal, cowardice and structural failure, much of it authored by the very political tradition Biman Prasad now leads.
London, 1970: NFP’s Original Sin and Temptation of Power
Let’s start at the beginning. At the 1970 London constitutional talks, the National Federation Party, hailed then as the voice of Indo-Fijians, capitulated. Instead of fighting for a democratic, non-racial order, they accepted a deal that entrenched communal seats, guaranteed chiefly veto power, and structurally locked Indo-Fijians out of full political equality.
And they did so while ignoring every demographic warning before them. Constitutional advisers at the time (including my own former academic supervisor the late Sir David Butler - real SIR, no manorial purchase of the title from an auction house) pointed out that the Indo-Fijian share of the population would begin to decline within a generation but NFP leaders signed away safeguards anyway. They came home with a flag, not a future.
That betrayal was the foundation stone of our political vulnerability. And it’s a vulnerability that has shaped every crisis since.
1987: Rabuka Turns a Problem Into a Catastrophe
If 1970 was the betrayal, 1987 was the hammer blow. Sitiveni Rabuka’s racist military coups, openly justified as a defence of “indigenous supremacy”, were a body blow to Indo-Fijian security and confidence. Families that had called Fiji home for generations suddenly found themselves treated as outsiders in their own country.
Tens of thousands fled. Teachers, doctors, engineers, business owners, the very backbone of the Indo-Fijian community, migrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and beyond. Many never returned. Rabuka’s coups didn’t just topple the Bavadra government; they shattered a community’s belief that it could ever belong.
And while Prasad likes to recite migration statistics as though they were inevitable, he rarely mentions that this mass exodus was not a natural demographic trend. It was a direct result of calculated political racism.
2006–2014: Bainimarama’s Attempt and the Continuing Exodus
Even the Bainimarama government, for all its authoritarian flaws, recognised the injustice and tried to reverse it. By enshrining equal and common citizenship in the 2013 Constitution, Bainimarama tore up the colonial-era racial labels and declared, for the first time, that every citizen was simply a “Fijian”.
But even that bold step could not undo decades of structural damage. By then, the Indo-Fijian diaspora was established, and many who had left were never coming back. Worse, young Indo-Fijians inside Fiji continued to see no real future in a country where political leaders, including Prasad’s current coalition partners, still wink at ethno-nationalism and glorify Rabuka as a “statesman.”
The exodus didn’t slow. In fact, in many ways, it deepened.
Biman Prasad’s Crocodile Tears
And so we come to Biman Prasad, standing on a shrinking political platform, lamenting a demographic reality his party helped create and successive governments failed to stop. He points fingers at Bainimarama for Brij Lal’s exile. He scolds Seruiratu for “politicising” the numbers. But he refuses to confront the uncomfortable truth:
- It was NFP’s cowardice in 1970 that left Indo-Fijians without constitutional protection.
- It was Rabuka’s racist coups in 1987 that triggered the mass migration.
- It was decades of political timidity, including by NFP, that allowed inequality and insecurity to persist even after Bainimarama introduced equal citizenship.
A Future Squandered
The Indo-Fijian story could have been one of confident nation-building. Instead, it is a story of permanent second-class status, political betrayal, and now, demographic disappearance. And the bitter irony is that Biman Prasad, who today clutches his pearls over shrinking numbers, leads the same party that signed our future away 55 years ago.
If he truly wants to honour Indo-Fijians, he should stop playing the helpless academic and start telling the truth: our decline was not inevitable. It was engineered by colonial compromise, by coup-era racism, and by the political cowardice of leaders who still refuse to apologise.
The Last Word for NFP leader Biman Prasad
So here’s a message for the NFP leader Biman Prasad: Indo-Fijians don’t need lectures. They need accountability. They need leaders willing to confront the betrayal of 1970, condemn the crimes of 1987, and finally deliver the security that even Bainimarama’s reforms could not guarantee.
Until then, his tears over demographic decline are just that - tears. And history will record that when the Indo-Fijian community needed courage, the NFP gave them compromise. When they needed protection, they got platitudes.
And when they needed a future, they got a footnote.
The NFP delegation returned from London with a constitution that was less a social contract than a surrender document. The party's failure in 1970 was not just seats and constitutions. It was about vision, or rather, the lack of it. Instead of imaging a Fiji where citizenship trumped ethnicity, they opted for communal compartments and colonial compromises. Instead of future-proofing Indo-Fijian rights against demographic shifts, they gambled everything on static population ratios.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation, and its consequences are now irreversible.
So when Biman Prasad blames migration or fertility rates, he's only telling half the story. Yes, Indo-Fijians left in droves because they were made to feel they had no stake in a system stacked against them from the start. Yes, many had fewer children because they saw no future in a state that structurally diminished their voice.
And who built that state?
It wasn't Frank Bainimarama. It wasn't Inia Seruiratu. It wasn't even Sitiveni Rabuka. It was the NFP's London delegation in 1970 - Prasad's politicial ancestors - who sold our community's constitutional future for a Union Jack handover ceremony and a few polite handshakes in Whitehall.
So yes, former professor of statistics, the numbers don't lie. But neither does history. And history will record that long before Indo-Fijians began leaving Fiji, the NFP leadership left them behind in London in 1970.
Rabuka: Bring Back South African 'Apartheid'Fijileaks: Astonishingly, in June 2000, shortly after George Speight and others seized Parliament, Rabuka told the world that the old South Africa might be a model for Fiji. |  Brandishing the 1997 Constitution |
Rabuka said Fiji might need racially segregated houses of parliament, ‘like pre-Mandela South Africa’, as part of a constitutional settlement to its problems. The solution to Fiji's problems ‘must come with a constitutional arrangement that [i-Taukei] Fijians can work with ... and at the moment, they cannot work with the 1997 Constitution’.
*Basically, he was disowning the very 1997 Rabuka-Reddy Constitution that PAP-NFP is now brandishing around the country. The typical opportunist in time of crisis Rabuka: "I supported every move to destabilise the Chaudhry government, but I was not part of the coup. I was not involved in any of the [pre-coup] marches. But I was going to be involved in the next one because it was [to be held at] the time of the signing of the successor to the Lome Convention this month.’
*Rabuka said he had known Speight and had played golf with him and knew of his commitment to indigenous rights. However, he did not agree that Speight represented the ‘soul’ or the ‘voice’ of the indigenous people, or the i-Taukei:
‘Why should he consider himself the voice of the iTaukei His grandfather was a European? The military has only [negotiated with] Speight because of the security of the hostages. He has no legal claim. I don't have any moral stance on whether his actions are right or wrong. I cannot say anything about that because I was in the coup in 1987. I am giving my opinions as a private citizen. But Speight has lost the plot and right now he is trying to hang onto every little straw that floats by. He is living in a bubble, and very soon that bubble will burst.’
Professor Brij Vilash Lal and I were academic friends for decades. We corresponded frequently, shared drafts, and debated ideas long before politics divided Fiji’s scholars.
However, it is a matter of record, and of honesty, that until his deportation and permanent banning from Fiji, the late Brij Lal chose not to be publicly critical of the post-2006 regime.
He told me personally that he needed continued access to Fiji’s archives while completing his monumental work on the Indian diaspora, and that open confrontation might jeopardise that research access.
That was his pragmatic choice as a historian, not a moral failing. I respected it then, as I do now.
To acknowledge this historical truth is not to diminish him, but to show how scholars, writers, and journalists must each navigate truth and survival differently.
I have always honoured his scholarship and friendship; what I reject is the revisionist myth that he was an outspoken critic from the beginning. He became one later, after the door to Fiji was slammed shut on him.
And let us not forget this inconvenient truth: the late Professor Brij Lal, whose exile Biman Prasad so often invokes as a symbol of Fiji's injustice, was himself no longer a Fiji citizen.
He had renounced his Fijian nationality decades ago, becoming an American citizen in 1993 and an Australian citizen in 1995. In an 2000 interview, he declared that he would probably 'never go back to Fiji'.
In acquiring those American and Australian citizenships, he was joining thousands of Indo-Fijians who were making the same choice, leaving behind the land of their birth in search of dignity and opportunity abroad. In Brij Lal's case, he wanted to give back to Australia, his adopted country, by writing a new history of its relationship with the Pacific islands.
RIP, Professor Brij Vilash Lal.
From 1987 to 1999, Rabuka and his quasi-civilian military regime made no attempt to introduce dual citizenship because he never wanted Indo-Fijians he had driven out to have a pathway back.
Their exile was not an unfortunate consequence of politics. It was a deliberate policy.
However, it is a matter of record, and of honesty, that until his deportation and permanent banning from Fiji, the late Brij Lal chose not to be publicly critical of the post-2006 regime.
He told me personally that he needed continued access to Fiji’s archives while completing his monumental work on the Indian diaspora, and that open confrontation might jeopardise that research access.
That was his pragmatic choice as a historian, not a moral failing. I respected it then, as I do now.
To acknowledge this historical truth is not to diminish him, but to show how scholars, writers, and journalists must each navigate truth and survival differently.
I have always honoured his scholarship and friendship; what I reject is the revisionist myth that he was an outspoken critic from the beginning. He became one later, after the door to Fiji was slammed shut on him.
And let us not forget this inconvenient truth: the late Professor Brij Lal, whose exile Biman Prasad so often invokes as a symbol of Fiji's injustice, was himself no longer a Fiji citizen.
He had renounced his Fijian nationality decades ago, becoming an American citizen in 1993 and an Australian citizen in 1995. In an 2000 interview, he declared that he would probably 'never go back to Fiji'.
In acquiring those American and Australian citizenships, he was joining thousands of Indo-Fijians who were making the same choice, leaving behind the land of their birth in search of dignity and opportunity abroad. In Brij Lal's case, he wanted to give back to Australia, his adopted country, by writing a new history of its relationship with the Pacific islands.
RIP, Professor Brij Vilash Lal.
From 1987 to 1999, Rabuka and his quasi-civilian military regime made no attempt to introduce dual citizenship because he never wanted Indo-Fijians he had driven out to have a pathway back.
Their exile was not an unfortunate consequence of politics. It was a deliberate policy.
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Nehru India’s Shadow and the Nehru Dilemma
India’s instinctive embrace of Indo-Fijian causes has been both a source of strength and a barrier to Fiji’s racial reconciliation. From the days of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s leaders have wrestled with a fundamental question: are overseas Indians to be treated as Indian nationals abroad, or as citizens of their new homelands? Nehru’s answer, delivered in 1948, was clear: they must integrate, identify with their adopted nations, and expect only cultural and humanitarian, not political, support from India.
Yet successive Indian governments have repeatedly blurred that line, and Indo-Fijian leaders like Mahendra Chaudhry have benefited from it. Every time Indo-Fijians “sneezed”, as one observer quipped, “Mother India caught a fever.”
And in Chaudhry’s case, India’s fever came with a hefty cheque of $2million in 2000.
India’s instinctive embrace of Indo-Fijian causes has been both a source of strength and a barrier to Fiji’s racial reconciliation. From the days of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s leaders have wrestled with a fundamental question: are overseas Indians to be treated as Indian nationals abroad, or as citizens of their new homelands? Nehru’s answer, delivered in 1948, was clear: they must integrate, identify with their adopted nations, and expect only cultural and humanitarian, not political, support from India.
Yet successive Indian governments have repeatedly blurred that line, and Indo-Fijian leaders like Mahendra Chaudhry have benefited from it. Every time Indo-Fijians “sneezed”, as one observer quipped, “Mother India caught a fever.”
And in Chaudhry’s case, India’s fever came with a hefty cheque of $2million in 2000.
