With the steady diet of listening to ‘India-bashing’, ‘little India’, ‘big brother’ and the prime minister becoming the self-appointed guardian of Delhi’s honour, it’s easy to forget that this love for India amongst our political class is of relatively recent vintage. 

In the 1880s, sugar estates going through financial trouble decided to sell off some of their land to some of their labourers and foremen: these eventually mutated into an Indo-Mauritian aristocracy of sorts and these planters became the base of the Labour Party. Initially, this new and insecure class clung to ties with India. Following World War II and the resulting retreat of the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, the Mauritian political elite’s relationship with India cooled somewhat. This was for two reasons: the Mauritan and Indian experience of British colonialism was radically different. For Indian (and subsequently, Pakistani) nationalists, the British period was viewed as an era of theft, plunder and national humiliation. For the rising Mauritian political elite, however, their main enemy was seen as the local plantocracy, with the British playing the role of a more socially-progressive referee, eager to see them rise as a counterweight to a plantocracy that London did not fully trust. Naturally, the Labour Party expected that with the British leaving, they would replace them, so no point antagonising London by importing radical Indian slogans. 

After independence in 1968, despite paying lip-service to the historical relationship with India, in practice, Mauritius did not allow them to interfere with policy. Dependent upon Europe for sugar exports and tourism, Port Louis kept its distance from New Delhi. India leaned towards the Soviets, Mauritius was firmly in the western orbit. India hated apartheid in South Africa, Mauritius had no qualms doing business with it. This pro-western tilt in Port Louis only deepened with the emergence of a left-leaning government in the Seychelles in 1977, and Port Louis became its pro-western counterweight in the Indian Ocean. In addition, the Labour Party sought to use this to beat back the challenge from the leftish opposition MMM. Whatever its other failings, the Mauritian political elite at this time displayed a hawk-eyed realism. Sentimentality about India had its place: a distant second after business. Buildings might be named after Gandhi and Nehru, but the former’s dream of building Ruritania and the latter’s state capitalism had no serious buyers in Mauritius. The result was that India figured little in local politics: in 1987, voters were scared by the coup in Fiji and not by supposed ‘India-bashing’. 

This began to change in the 1990s. Learning from China, a newly-liberalising India wanted to court its diaspora populations to attract investments. The financial centre grew on the strength of a tax treaty with India and with the collapse of ideology, identity politics and identification with India now came centre-stage: Delhi obliged by sending gurus and huge temple complexes sprung up throughout Mauritius. Fiji was swiftly forgotten and India went from being largely ignored to becoming something that every local politician had to praise lustily. Or at least avoid being seen criticising. The low-point being letters sent by Pravind Jugnauth to India to try to block funding for the Light Rail Transit System and later by Roshi Bhadain to get India to block funding for the metro. 

Here is the irony: India now is realistic about its relationship with Mauritius. The financial sector is just a victim of a larger Indian ambition of weaning money away from Mauritius to budding financial centres in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. While it is Mauritius now that – under the strain of local identity politics – seems to have lost its capacity for realistically understanding and pursuing its self-interest. 

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