Grubsheet – like many old-timers in the media – has been saddened by the death of arguably Fiji’s finest journalist, Vijendra Kumar, who was the first local to edit one of our newspapers and presided over the Fiji Times during some of the nation’s most turbulent events.
Saturday’s edition of the paper rightly published a great deal about Vijendra Kumar’s contribution to the FT and to Fijian journalism. But unsurprisingly for a paper that is now more a propaganda rag than a genuine newspaper of record, it was highly selective in its assessment of Kumar’s record.
There were fulsome tributes from some of his contemporaries in the Times newsroom, including Richard Naidu, Netani Rika, Charlie Charters and Richard Thomson. Yet only Richard Thomson reflected a notable feature of Kumar’s approach to public life that the others studiously ignored – that Vijendra Kumar supported Frank Bainimarama‘s agenda to impose a common and equal citizenry in Fiji in a manner that was anathema to the overwhelming majority of anti-Bainimarama individuals on the Fiji Times.
In this instance, Vijendra Kumar and Grubsheet had common cause. And for a long time, we had friendly exchanges as I argued publicly – and he argued publicly – that the 2006 coup had been necessary to level the playing field in Fiji and prevent the tyranny of the majority from swamping the rights of minorities. Take a look at the link to my Grubsheet piece in 2012 below highlighting an article by Vijendra Kumar in which he compared Frank Bainimarama to Jerry Rawlings in Ghana in being a coup leader who made a necessary undemocratic intervention to ultimately make democracy more representative and more just. Of course, it was in the Fiji Sun because the Fiji Times simply wouldn’t have published it.
Vijendra Kumar and I came to be dismayed and disillusioned as Frank Bainimarama – urged on by Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum – eventually succumbed, after 2014, to the folly of many democratically-elected leaders in believing they were indispensable and adopted many of the same features of a dictatorship under FijiFirst. But that is no reason for the Fiji Times to rewrite history and ignore the fact that, for a time, its lauded former editor was a Bainimarama supporter. Just as it rewrites history about the supposed vendetta against the paper for its hate speech against Muslims in Nai Lalakai, when it had been specifically warned that in the absence of hate speech laws, it risked being prosecuted for sedition for stirring up hatred against an important minority.
Why did Vijendra Kumar become a Bainimarama supporter? Well partly because of the suffering he experienced at the hands of Sitiveni Rabuka, whose campaign for indigenous supremacy continues to this day. The first Rabuka years left a permanent scar on him that eventually saw him abandon Fiji altogether in disillusionment. Just as tens of thousands of people are again doing today as the full horror sinks in of Rabuka’s renewed assault on a common and equal citizenry and a common identity.
Here’s an article from 2017 by Victor Lal of Fijileaks – another prominent journalist who suffered at Rabuka’s hands – including a review by Professor Shailendra Singh, now head of journalism at USP, of Vijendra Kumar’s memoirs. It is worth reading if only to give some balance to the selective hagiography of the Great Man by some of his contemporaries at the Fiji Times. And to remember someone of integrity and courage who was head and shoulders above those around him and was a stellar practitioner of the “craft” of journalism and the notion of the media existing to serve not its owners but its readers, viewers and listeners.
Vale Vijendra Kumar. Gone but not forgotten.
Here’s the link to the piece I wrote in 2012 about Vijendra Kumar comparing Frank Bainimarama to Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings. It wasn’t a review of his book, which came four years later. Incidentally, it was several months before I went to Fiji to work as a consultant to Qorvis on its Fiji account and became the government’s principal communications advisor.
In the end, like Vijendra Kumar, I became disillusioned and left. But it’s important that what actually happened is on the public record, and not just the favoured narrative of an empowered few.
My apologies for Word Press decapitating our hero. Here’s his head restored.
Fiji is full of dickheads – which is not a problem in itself. What is a problem is that Fiji is full of proud and arrogant dickheads. That is a big problem for the country. How do you fix it?
One thing is for certain, you cannot fix it from within. Simply too many small brains who are now not sure whether they are Christians or Jews. Some 37 years after the biggest dickhead tried to fix the problems for the iTaukei, exactly nothing has changed. He still has unfinished business some 4 decades later. So when will Fijians learn, that they are all dickheads?
I mean, the first step in fixing any problem is to identify the problem. So when will Fijians realise that they are all idiots?
Now they all do not need to wonder why they are where they are. I just told them.
Vijendra Kumar had an uncanny gift of words, and when he strung words into a sentence and sentences into paragraphs what came out was like poetry, beautifully constructed editorials and feature stories. He was a big loss to Fiji, one of the thousands who left our shores disillusioned after Rabuka’s 1987 coups.
So many democracies where positive discrimination exists to achieve equity for minorities. Only in Fiji would it be the case to positively discriminate against minorities to enhance the sense of entitlement of the majority.
A brilliant and perceptive observation. Many thanks for sharing it.
Yes a poignant observation. Malaysia may join this exclusive club with Fiji. The majority people of that land, bhumiputras and their economic status have similarities with Fiji.
Probably why Rabuka leant toward the Malays post 87 coup for policy ideas, cooperation and inspiration (on how to run a country into the ground).
That’s why being like Singapore, rather than Malaysia, is aspirational in multiple fronts.
If it wasn’t for the minority:
– would there be interest free loans?
– would there be a Ministry of iTaukei Affairs?
– would there be a GCC?
– would there be special scholarships for the iTaukei?
– who would there be to blame?
– would Christianity or Israel be embraced with so much fake passion?
– where would Fiji be in terms of development?
– where would the iTaukei be in terms of development?
– what would be the per capita income?
– where would Fiji Airways be?
– what would the state of tourism be?
–
History should be told and written with truth. Mr Kumar did just that. An incredible journalist of his time who wrote facts.
I can imagine how much he compromised in his lifetime to tell these stories.
RIP Mr Kumar.
We will always remember you as one of the best in Fiji’s media industry. I can certainly say there is not a single soul left in Fiji who can reach anywhere near to what he achieved because there is no honesty and dignity left in Fiji’s media industry.
Sorry but Bainimarama was a crook and a charlatan from the beginning right to the end.
As Mr Kumar rightly observed: ‘Coup-makers’ corpses eventually end up rotting on the dung heap of history’ [a quote that seems to have escaped you when you penned your ‘My Best Mate Vijendra and Me Are The Only Ones Who Understand Fiji’ piece.
I thought of you while watching Mai TV’s coverage of the dismantling of the FijiFirst offices last week: your constant bleating over the years about Bainimarama and what a champion of common citizenry and equal rights when he was clearly at a very fundamental level no such thing and never was, and how you insist that we have a functioning constitution despite all the evidence to the contrary.
And as it happened I was reading some Shelley at the time.
‘I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Golly Charlie, it’s taken you two days to come up with this? To find a poem from Shelley that “you were reading at the time” to address the point I made about your selective hagiography?
“Reading at the time’? The Yorkshireman sits on his bar stool staring into his Old Peculier and dipping occasionally into Shelley’s collected works? Crikey.
Fact: Frank Bainimarama produced the first constitution in Fijian history that declared a common and equal citizenry, a common identity and a secular state. Now we know you hate it but that’s how it is.
Now go back to your poems. I can recommend one by T.S Eliot called the Hollow Men which perfectly describes you and your kai vata:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass