The Rezistans ek Alternativ (ReA) seems to be doubling down on its strategy: it has a case in the Supreme Court to allow candidates to stand in elections without declaring their ethnicity. This time round, the ReA and its supporters have roped in Chief Justice Eddy Balancy and made a big issue over the state’s request that Balancy recuse himself from the case. The ReA’s grandstanding in court, however, masks the fact that all this is really just a storm in a teacup. There is little that is ‘progressive’ at stake here.
 
This demand of the ReA has long surfed on a deliberate confusion between the requirement to declare one’s candidacy and opposition to the Best Loser System (BLS). The ReA presents its tactic as one that will eventually lead to the abolition of the other, whereas this is nowhere near the truth. And this is not just speculation: it has been tested in practice not once but twice. In 2005, Balancy, then a Supreme Court judge, ruled that 11 ReA candidates should be allowed to stand as candidates without declaring their ethnicity (his previous verdict is why the state wants him to recuse himself). They did, and neither communalism nor the BLS was affected in any way whatsoever. All it did was create a new category of candidates who refused to fall into any of the other four ‘communities’. Most candidates continued to declare their community because they wanted a chance to win a BLS seat. Those who did not were from marginal parties that were not elected anyway and treated as eccentricities. Nothing changed. Then once again in 2014, the Labour Party and the MMM shepherded through a ‘mini-amendment’ that allowed candidates the luxury of not declaring their ethnicity but for that election only. Once again, the same thing happened; only those who either were marginal forces with no hope of being elected or those who were sure of not being able to benefit from a BLS seat did not declare their ethnicity. Once again, the BLS and communalism marched as strongly as ever. That the ReA’s demand is not really ‘anti-communal’ has been firmly established by experience. However, that did not lead the ReA to reevaluate its strategy.

Nor has it proved to be an effective tactic in combating communalism, in fact, it’s led to its resurgence. The ReA took this strategy to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). In 2012, the UN came back with a verdict that noted that Mauritius’ electoral system itself was unusual: it had the BLS system, but in 1982, dropped recording ‘communities’ from the census, instead relying upon data from the 1970s to allocate BLS seats. So the BLS was not allowed to work properly as far as accurate representation went. The UNHRC then posited a choice: either bring back the ethnic census to let the BLS work, or reform the electoral system. Recently, the PMSD and some others have demanded – on the strength of the UN’s decision – that the ethnic census be brought back – a demand that would have been unthinkable from a major political party just a decade ago. And, moreover, a demand that would not have arisen had the ReA not gone to the UN to push for a strategy that did not really change anything much at all. Its strategy backfired spectacularly, fanning – instead of dousing – communalism. This too, we have learnt from bitter experience. Once again, it seems that the ReA has learnt nothing as it continues on its circus of banalities.

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