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Fiji’s December 2006 coup defied the assumptions upon which that country’s post-independence history had hitherto been written. Until then, it had been assumed that the indigenous Fijians would control the country’s politics. Even in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when numbers of indigenous Fijians and Fiji Indians were close to parity, election victories by parties with predominantly Fiji Indian support had each entailed constitutional crises (April 1977) or coups (1987, 1999-2000). Writing of the 1987 election with the benefit of hindsight, one scholar described the objectives of the leftist and multiracially oriented but largely Indian-backed Fiji Labour Party – which briefly formed a government before the military coup of that year – as ‘the politics of illusion’.1 Fiji’s ‘Facade of Democracy’, as Asesela Ravuvu called it at around the same time, concealed an unwritten rule that indigenous Fijians would remain politically ‘paramount’, which carried echoes of the assurances given to natives by Fiji’s first colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon.2 Were that structural hegemony breached, as in 1977, 1987 and 1999, there could be no doubt – many thought – that ethnic Fijians would react violently, and successfully restore their control over the nation’s political life, even if the economic sphere remained largely under Fiji Indian control.
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