Two weeks ago parliament decided to let the Electoral Commission decide in which of the constituencies to place the Chagos, in much the same way that Agalega is included in one of the constituencies of Port Louis. The opposition voiced two alternative ideas on where to place the Chagos on the Mauritian electoral scene. Neither of which, in the last analysis, stands up to scrutiny.

The PMSD says that it would prefer the Chagos to be part of a large ‘outer islands’ constituency that would club together Rodrigues, Chagos, Saint Brandon and Agalega as proposed in the 1966 Banwell report. This proposal is unworkable since each of these ‘outer islands’, apart from being remote from one another, also face disparate problems. Rodrigues has its own political parties, its own economy and a large population, whereas Agalega is sparsely populated and will have to contend with an Indian base and Chagos, since resettlement has not yet happened, has no voters.

The MMM, for its part, though it has not committed itself either way, says that it will study the proposal put forward by Olivier Bancoult’s Chagos Refugee Group (which itself is an idea picked up from the left-wing party Lalit) for the creation of a separate constituency for the Chagos with one MP. Bancoult has justified his demand by saying that “the needs, interests and goals of the people of mainland constituencies are not the same as those of a small island community over a thousand miles away”. There are two problems with this reasoning.

The first: Given that there are no Chagossians on the Chagos as yet, such divergent interests between the Chagos and ‘mainland’ constituencies do not as yet actually exist. The second: the Chagossians are not a community a ‘thousand miles away’ but rather are living within ‘mainland’ constituencies of Mauritius.

This makes Bancoult’s demand a little hard to sustain and if the government did indeed accede to it, it would be plunged into a political and constitutional dilemma. How would that MP for the Chagos be elected? Now all voters in Mauritius are wedded to a geographical principle: you vote in the constituency in which you live. But in the case of the Chagos, since there are no voters actually living there, there are only two ways out of this conundrum and both are exceedingly ugly. First, to identify who could vote in this constituency (simply counting those living there is obviously not possible) the government will then have to establish a separate electorate of Chagossians and their descendants separate from all other Mauritians (an idea that’s likely to be a partial endorsement of separatist feeling) and then disenfranchise them from ‘mainland’ constituencies. A Chagossian living, working and being affected by anything happening in Port Louis, for example, will not be allowed to vote there, but instead will be voting in a hypothetical and unpopulated constituency No. 22! For a multi-ethnic Mauritius, the dangers of such a concession of organising some of its voters not according to geography but according to ancestry is so obvious as hardly needs explaining.

The second option overlaps with the first: Give the Chagossians two votes – one for the constituency they are actually living in and another to elect the Chagossian MP. This too would involve the creation of a socially dangerous separate electorate on ethnic grounds and would make a mockery of constitutional equality of Mauritius’ citizens in terms of their political rights. Put simply, one category of Mauritians would be voting in two places while the rest only in one.

Symbolic actions have their use. And the government was right in rejecting this proposal. Let’s not count our chickens before they are hatched; we have to actually get the Chagos back before trying to decide whose political fiefdom it’s destined to become.

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