Communalism in Mauritius: Symptom of a Discriminatory National System

The persistence of the communal reflex in Mauritius is often reduced to a simple anomaly in our electoral mechanics. However, a deeper analysis reveals that the problem runs much deeper: communalism is merely the political expression of structural discrimination anchored at the very heart of our national system.

The Cause: A National Fracture, Not an Electoral One

The Mauritian communal reflex is not born in the isolation of voting booths. It draws its roots from deep historical structures that extend far beyond the framework of elections. Colonial legacies, the aftermath of indentured labour, and persistent inequalities still shape access to employment, education, land, and economic resources today. We face a national system that structurally discriminates based on community belonging. Communalism is its direct reflection.

The Role of the BLS: An Amplifier, Not the Engine

In this context, what is the actual role of the Best Loser System (BLS)? Contrary to popular belief, this mechanism did not create the communal reflex. While it accentuates it, this remains marginal and strictly confined to the electoral calendar. By imposing an identity declaration on candidates and freezing representation around four constitutional categories, the BLS merely activates, from time to time, a logic that is already omnipresent in civil society. It acts as a situational amplifier, not as the engine of these divisions.

The Illusion of Electoral Reform Alone

The logical conclusion of this observation is clear: an isolated electoral reform can never resolve the crisis. Removing or modifying the BLS will not make the communal reflex disappear. A purely institutional overhaul of the voting system only treats a peripheral symptom, leaving intact the underlying socio-economic discriminations that feed it. Only direct action against these structural inequalities will allow for real and lasting change in Mauritian political behaviour.

The International Perspective: The UN Position

This fundamental distinction between technical flaws and root causes is, moreover, confirmed by international bodies. As early as 2012, in the case of Narain v. Mauritius, the UN Human Rights Committee did not condemn the very principle of the BLS. It targeted two specific dysfunctions: the obligation for candidates to declare their community and the obsolete use of data from the 1972 census for the allocation of seats. More recently, observations from the CERD (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination) reflect these same divisions running through Mauritian civil society, oscillating between the urgency of technical reforms and the need for comprehensive social justice.

Le communalisme à Maurice : symptôme d'un système national discriminatoire

La persistance du réflexe communal à Maurice est souvent réduite à une simple anomalie de notre mécanique électorale. Pourtant, une analyse approfondie révèle que le problème est bien plus profond : le communalisme n'est que la traduction politique de discriminations structurelles ancrées au cœur même de notre système national.

La cause : une fracture nationale, et non électorale

Le réflexe communal mauricien ne naît pas dans l'isolement des bureaux de vote. Il puise ses racines dans des structures historiques profondes qui dépassent largement le cadre des scrutins. Les héritages coloniaux, les séquelles de l'engagisme (indentured labour) et des inégalités persistantes façonnent encore aujourd'hui l'accès à l'emploi, à l'éducation, au foncier et aux ressources économiques. Nous faisons face à un système national qui discrimine de manière structurelle selon l’appartenance communautaire. Le communalisme en est le reflet direct.

Le rôle du BLS : un amplificateur, pas le moteur

Dans ce contexte, quel est le rôle réel du Best Loser System (BLS) ? Contrairement aux idées reçues, ce mécanisme n'a pas créé le réflexe communal. S'il l'accentue, cela reste marginal et strictement circonscrit au calendrier électoral. En imposant une déclaration identitaire aux candidats et en figeant la représentation autour de quatre catégories constitutionnelles, le BLS ne fait qu'activer ponctuellement une logique déjà omniprésente dans la société civile. Il agit comme un amplificateur conjoncturel, non comme le moteur de ces divisions.

L'illusion de la seule réforme électorale

La conséquence logique de ce constat est sans appel : une réforme électorale isolée ne pourra jamais résoudre la crise. Supprimer ou modifier le BLS ne fera pas disparaître le réflexe communal. Une refonte purement institutionnelle du mode de scrutin ne fait que traiter un symptôme périphérique, laissant intactes les discriminations socio-économiques sous-jacentes qui le nourrissent. Seule une action directe contre ces inégalités structurelles permettra un changement réel et durable du comportement politique mauricien.

Le regard international : la position de l'ONU

Cette distinction fondamentale entre les failles techniques et les causes profondes est d'ailleurs confirmée par les instances internationales. Dès 2012, dans l'affaire Narain c. Maurice, le Comité des droits de l'homme de l'ONU n'a pas condamné le principe même du BLS. Il a ciblé deux dysfonctionnements précis : l'obligation faite aux candidats de déclarer leur communauté et l'utilisation obsolète des données du recensement de 1972 pour l'allocation des sièges. Plus récemment, les observations du CERD (Comité pour l'élimination de la discrimination raciale) reflètent ces mêmes clivages qui traversent la société civile mauricienne, oscillant entre l'urgence de réformes techniques et la nécessité d'une justice sociale globale. 

On excellence

Excellence is not attained by an obsession with how "better" you are than others. It is not about status seeking. It is, foremost, about besting yourself — without compromising on your values.

There are two kinds of striving, and they get conflated often.

Comparative excellence measures you against others: rank, status, being "the best." It's externally referenced, so it's inherently unstable. There is always someone ahead of you, and the goalposts move with the field.

Self-referential excellence measures today against yesterday — this work against your last attempt, your conduct against your own standards. It's stable because the reference point is internal, and always available to you.

The values clause matters most. Without it, "besting yourself" can slide into pure optimisation — cutting corners, treating people as instruments, sacrificing integrity for output. Add "without compromising on your values," and the bar changes. It's no longer just did I improve? It becomes did I improve in a way I can stand behind? That is what separates excellence from mere achievement.

Aristotle said something close to this: arete isn't winning a contest — it's a thing functioning well according to its own nature. A knife being sharp. A person acting in line with reason and virtue. The comparison, if there is one, is between the thing and its own potential — not between the thing and some other thing.

The Hindu tradition frames it differently but arrives close by. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of svadharma — one's own duty, one's own nature-given path — and holds that it is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at another's. Excellence, here, isn't measured against a universal ranking either; it's measured against fidelity to what is truly yours to do. The Gita adds something Aristotle doesn't dwell on: act well, but release your grip on the outcome.

Excellence lives in the quality of the effort, not in the comparison of results.

The Japanese tradition expresses it through practice rather than doctrine. Kaizen — "change for the better" — treats excellence not as a summit you reach, but as continuous, almost imperceptible improvement, day after day. Close to it, the ideal of the shokunin — the craftsman who devotes an entire life to a single trade — carries the sense that a moral and aesthetic duty accompanies work done well: refining your movement not to surpass others, but out of obligation to the craft itself, and to those who will receive the work. The sushi master Jiro Ono, still repeating his movements after decades, embodies this: you never arrive, you only keep drawing closer.

The Islamic tradition names this too, and perhaps more precisely. Ihsan — often translated "excellence," or "doing what is beautiful" — is defined in a well-known hadith as worshipping as though you see God, and if you do not see Him, knowing that He sees you. Set aside the theology and the structure remains: the standard for your conduct is something constant and unseen, not an audience. Which means the quality of the work can never depend on who's watching.

That, in the end, is the whole idea. Four traditions, four vocabularies, one claim: excellence held to a standard no one else can see.

Many decades of "no alternative": what the rupee's nosedive actually reveals

When the Bank of Mauritius abolished exchange controls in July 1994 and let the rupee float, the promise was simple: a currency set free by markets, disciplined by fundamentals, would find its natural level — and a “competitive” rupee would carry the island's export sector into a new era of growth. Three decades on, the rupee has lost roughly two-thirds of its value against the dollar. The export sector it was meant to power now imports more than it earns. And the official language used to explain each fresh depreciation reads almost word for word like the language used to explain the last one, and the one before that.

This is worth pausing on, because it isn't really a story about currency mechanics. It's a story about how a plausible economic idea, applied without regard for the structure of the economy it was applied to, calcified into an alibi.

The idea, and where it broke

The theory behind the 1994 float was standard textbook fare: a weaker currency makes your exports cheaper abroad, which should lift export volumes, which should lift growth. Mauritius had just spent a decade liberalising — interest rates freed in stages through the late 1980s, exchange controls loosened progressively, capital account restrictions lifted — and the float was the capstone. This was the dominant policy consensus of the era, and Mauritius was a diligent student of it.

The trouble is that the mechanism only works cleanly if a country's exports are not themselves built on imported inputs. Mauritius's are. Its manufacturing and services sectors run on imported fuel, imported machinery, imported intermediate goods and now on imported labour too. So a weaker rupee doesn't just make Mauritian exports cheaper — it simultaneously makes them more expensive to produce. The theoretical gain and the practical cost arrive by the same channel, and depending on the sector, they can cancel out or worse. The Bank of Mauritius knew this by the late 1990s: after the rupee fell sharply in 1996, 1997 and 1998, the central bank spent the next several years fighting the inflation that depreciation itself had fed, not export-led growth.

That should have been the moment the underlying model got revisited. It wasn't. Instead, the explanation shifted from "the float will work" to "the float is working, we just need complementary reforms" — and that reframing has held, with minor variations, for the better part of thirty years.

The recycled diagnosis

Read the IMF's Article IV consultations on Mauritius back to back and the pattern is almost eerie. In 2014, the Fund noted that the authorities, faced with falling competitiveness, believed structural reform and labour productivity gains — not currency management — were the real fix. In 2019, months before the pandemic, the Fund was again flagging a deteriorating external balance and an accommodative, expansionary policy stance alongside calls to "regain competitiveness." By 2025, following a currency collapse that the country's own Bank of Mauritius audit attributes substantially to internal policy choices, the Fund's language is nearly identical: the external position is weaker than fundamentals justify, and structural reform is what's needed.

Ten years, the same diagnosis, the same prescribed remedy, and a currency that has done nothing but slide. At some point a repeated diagnosis that never produces a cure is not a diagnosis. It's a script.

Two convenient untruths

Two claims have done most of the work of keeping that script alive.

The first is that productivity gains are the master key — that if Mauritius simply reforms education, labour markets and ease of doing business hard enough, competitiveness returns regardless of what the currency does. This isn't false so much as radically incomplete: productivity reform is slow, structural, and politically costly, which makes it a comfortable thing to recommend and a comfortable thing to keep not quite finishing. It lets policymakers point to a horizon goal instead of the balance sheet decisions being made this quarter.

The second is that imported-input inflation is a regrettable side effect of depreciation rather than a central feature of it. It is not a side effect. In an import-dependent economy, it is close to the whole story: the trade deficit pressures the currency, the weaker currency raises the cost of the next shipment of fuel and inputs, and the loop tightens. Mauritius's own trade data shows exactly this mechanism at work, with the current account deficit widening even as officials describe the situation as temporary.

What TINA obscures

None of this means Mauritius had unlimited room to manoeuvre. Small open economies exposed to global capital flows and tourism receipts genuinely do face real constraints, and "there is no alternative" is sometimes simply an accurate description of a narrow reserve position. But TINA has been doing double duty in Mauritius: describing a real constraint in the moment, while quietly erasing the question of how the constraint was built.

It was built, in large part, by choices that had nothing to do with market forces finding a natural level. Public capital injected into failing banks in 2015 and 2016, financed off the state's own balance sheet. Roughly eighteen billion rupees pumped into the system since 2019 — liquidity creation that a government-commissioned audit later found had accelerated the rupee's fall and stoked the very inflation officials were publicly attributing to global shocks. The same audit went further, questioning whether the central bank's independence had been compromised during this period. These are not the actions of an economy passively absorbing an unavoidable external shock. They are the actions of institutions repeatedly reaching for the balance sheet as the path of least resistance, then describing the bill for it as fate.

Fatalism, cynicism, or incompetence — probably all three, in sequence

It would be simpler if this were one villain: an incompetent central bank, or a cynical government protecting narrow interests. The record over thirty years suggests something less tidy and, in a way, more damning — a form of institutional path dependency that has survived multiple governments and multiple central bank governors.

The diagnosis has rarely been wrong; Article IV reports going back over a decade correctly identified a widening external imbalance and a weakening competitive position. What's failed, repeatedly, is the instrument. Each time a hard structural choice presented itself, the easier lever was the one pulled: recapitalise a bank rather than let it fail transparently and account for the cost in the budget; inject liquidity rather than raise taxes or cut protected spending; let the currency absorb the strain rather than confront the interests that benefit from the status quo. None of this required believing the depreciation story was false. It required only that believing it be convenient — and after a decade of convenience, the belief and the convenience became difficult to tell apart.

That is what makes fatalism the wrong word for where things stand today. Fatalism implies nothing could have been done. Something could have been done, repeatedly, by identifiable people in identifiable institutions, and the record — including the country's own government audit — says so in plain language. Whether that adds up to incompetence or cynicism is, in the end, a less useful question than the one it's usually asked instead of: whether the same institutions, faced with the same choice again, will reach for the same lever.

The Trap of Nationalist and Exotic Lenses

The hostile reactions against The Apu Trilogy and Persepolis stem from the same tragic misinterpretation: both works were reduced to political weapons when they were meant to be mirrors of the human soul.

The Nationalist Reaction: The Instrumentalisation of the Image

Indian critics of Satyajit Ray, much like the Iranian state, perceived art through the lens of national public relations. They suffered from a defensive anxiety.

The Suppression: The Iranian regime equated Marjane Satrapi’s critique of fundamentalism with treason. It confused her defense of individual freedom with an attack on Iranian identity.
The Defensive: In the same way, Indian politicians feared that Ray’s raw realism would validate Western stereotypes of a developing and powerless nation.

In both cases, the authorities demanded an artificial and sanitised patriotism. They prioritised the image of the state at the expense of the honest and complex realities of their own people.

The Western Misinterpretation: Voyeurism and Amalgamation

While local authorities feared that art would make them look weak, the Western audience made the opposite mistake. They filtered both masterpieces through the lens of cultural distance and geopolitical bias:

Misery Porn (Miserabilism): Westerners stripped The Apu Trilogy of its poetic joy. They reduced Apu’s universal coming-of-age journey to a dark spectacle of "Third-World" poverty.
Geopolitical Amalgamation: Facing Persepolis, Western viewers focused so heavily on the horrors of the Islamic Revolution that they confused the oppressive regime with the Iranian people themselves.

The West consumed these deeply personal narratives as exotic political traumas. It thus missed the daily warmth, humour, and love that animate the characters.

The Fundamental Link: The Erasure of the Human

The ultimate bridge between local rejection and foreign misunderstanding remains the erasure of the universal human. By focusing strictly on politics and poverty, both sides missed what Ray and Satrapi truly achieved.

They did not write manifestos on national failure or misery. They documented the silent and indestructible resilience of ordinary people in the face of extraordinary adversity. The tragedy of their reception lies in the fact that defensive nationalists and voyeuristic Westerners proved the authors right: they looked at the suffering, but completely missed the humanity.

L'IA optimise nos énergies et nos désirs. Elle n'a pas le souffle créatif pour aller plus loin

L'IA nous surpassera probablement en matière d'information et de performance mécanique, et pourra même simuler la sagesse et le jugement esthétique — mais elle ne sera jamais un génie, car elle ne fait qu'équilibrer des données en fonction de nos désirs.

Cette affirmation s'affine au fil de la réflexion : « se contenter de suivre des données et des désirs » ne peut être la ligne de démarcation, puisque la cognition humaine est elle aussi façonnée par des données et des désirs. Et « puiser dans un fonds collectif » ne le peut pas non plus, car aucun génie individuel ne crée à partir de rien. L'originalité absolue est une illusion ; chacun recombine une matière commune.

Ce qui distingue véritablement le génie, ce n'est donc pas la matière, mais la capture — la manière singulière d'une personne de courber cette même lumière partagée. Et ce qui rend cette capture durable à travers une œuvre, c'est la continuité : un dialogue avec soi-même qui dure des décennies, chaque pièce tendant vers quelque chose que l'on ressent sans encore l'avoir atteint, porté par de véritables enjeux — la réputation, l'obsession, le risque de se tromper.

C'est ce qui manque à l'IA actuelle — non pas l'originalité, puisque personne ne la possède réellement, mais un arc auto-référentiel soutenu dans le temps, et quelque chose à perdre. Elle recommence à zéro à chaque fois. Elle peut donc très bien approximer le fonds commun, mais elle n'a pas encore de capture qui lui soit propre.

AI optimises our inputs. It doesn't have the creative flair to carry forward

 AI will likely out-inform and out-perform us mechanically, and may even simulate wisdom and aesthetic judgment — but it won't be "the real thing," because it's just balancing inputs against our desires.

That claim gets refined through the conversation: "merely following prompts" can't be the dividing line, since human cognition is also shaped by inputs. And "draws from a collective pool" can't be it either, since no individual genius creates from nothing. Absolute originality is a delusion; everyone recombines shared material.

What actually distinguishes genius, then, isn't the material but the capture — a person's particular, idiosyncratic way of bending the same shared light. And what makes that capture durable across a body of work is continuity: a decades-long argument with oneself, each piece pushing toward something felt but not yet reached, backed by real stakes — reputation, obsession, the risk of being wrong.

That's what current AI lacks — not originality, since no one has that, but a sustained, self-referential arc and skin in the game. It starts fresh each time. So it can approximate the pool very well, but doesn't yet have a capture of its own.