Mauritius Independent
Coalition of Pro and Anti-Independence Parties (Labour and PMSD) causes mass unrest, MMM founded, General Strike, Students' rebellion, wildcat strikes by women factory workers. Coalition uses State of Emergency and generalized repression on working class and MMM leaders. It is in these conditions that LALIT (which was first called LALIT DE KLAS), would be born.
Nation-wide student rebellion involving 20,000 students, gives political birth in its wake to many future LALIT DE KLAS members including leading members Ragini Kistnasamy, Alain Ah-Vee, Rajni Lallah, Rada Kistnasamy, and also Dini Lallah, Mala Toussaint, Dolly Antoine, Ashok Joosery, and later Dev Ramano and others. THis student movement in turn gives birth to LEKOL KOPERATIV, a mass movement around students learning mainly school subjects with a new pedagogy, and which begins to heal some of the scars from the Port Louis race riots, as the Lekol Koperativ main branch was in Port Louis, though it had seven other branches. Around 1982-3 the Lekol Koperativ would be attacked and weakened by MMM councillors.
Setting up in Bambous by villagers and Dr. Ram Seegobin of Bambous Health Project a village health co-operative that would unite people in Bambous around a common health program for 25 years. This organization would later be kept alive and strong by a Committee which included LALIT members like Amyot Perrine, Ramesh Khaytoo, Kok Chandee, Ragini Kistnasamy, Kolet Marcelin, Cadet Couyava, Lindsey Collen, while the doctor, Ram Seegobin, would later also be a leading LALIT member. This experience would contribute enormously to the production of the program PEOPLES' HEALTH that would later, in 1981, be prepared for the MMM by its Health Commission under the presidency of Ram Seegobin, but the MMM would not only not adopt this report, but also refuse to even circulate it; it was later adopted by the newly founded LALIT as its health program, and it is the basis of LALIT's health program till today.
Setting up of first Playgroups, which later became a Federation, and which produced many LALIT de KLAS and LALIT members, including Laval Veerasamy and later Pushpa Lallah.
LALIT born in form of LALIT DE KLAS out of the high-spirited and rebellious times. It starts as a 50-page monthly "tribune libre" magazine, soon developing into a political voice to the left of the MMM and also into a tendency within the MMM. Early articles include ones on the stakes in the coming 1976 general elections (Jean-Claude Bibi), the nature of the State in Mauritius, the competing sectors of the bourgeoisie (Ram Seegobin). Other founders are Paul Duval, Nalini Burn, Bob Burn, Evelyn Bibi, Lindsey Collen, and early members include Ragini Kistnasamy, Marie-Claire Bibi, Raj Seegobin, Vishnu Jugdhurry. All articles are in Kreol, which is now being developed as a written language for the first time by LALIT DE KLAS (as well as by the MMMSP party, which later disappears), and this enables 100's of contributors to write about their work experiences, political experiences, attempts at setting up co-operatives and so on. Soon a LALIT DE KLAS structure develops, whereby there is an Assembly of Distributors (some 50 or 60) who sell the monthly magazine LALIT DE KLAS in a 1,000 (sometimes 1,500 or 2,000) copies, and it meets, gives broad political form to the magazine, and elects the Editorial Board of 12. The Editorial Board writes articles and gets them written by others, types them, cyclostyles them, and in an atmosphere of festivity, collates and binds them, before getting them to co-distributors. It would come out in 58 monthly editions over the next years. LALIT DE KLAS members had, as well as political commitment, to be active in social, union, neighbourhood or co-operative mass organiations.
The association, PLAYGROUPS, which would later, and until now, have many LALIT members, including Laval Veerasamy and much later, Pushpa Lallah, was born in 1975 and federated neighbourhood groups of pre-school parents and teachers.
Out of the mass movements of the early '70's, the birth of two organizations that were, and continued consistently to be, close to LALIT, the Muvman Liberasyon Fam (women's liberation organization) which had for one year previously prepared the founding program by holding neighbourhood meetings) and the Ledikasyon pu Travayer (workers' education association) which, though set up originally for adult literacy would later come to be the spear head of the fight for the peoples' languages, Kreol and Bhojpuri, and would publish and print a whole library of literature, as well as act as a focus for other associations, unions and co-ops.
Series of debates, chaired by LALIT DE KLAS member Naresh Servansing, begins at Maison des Jeunes, Port Louis, between the "nationalists" of the "Lel Gos" of the MMM who see national liberation as a "step" towards socialism. LALIT DE KLAS wins the debates; LALIT DE KLAS also has written debates with the MMMSP (Maoist at the time).
LALIT de KLAS becomes rallying point for and spear-head of following struggles: trade union, women's, young peoples'; Diego Garcia retrocession, base closure and reparations for Islanders; anti-Apartheid, for the Kreol language, and against repression. LALIT de KLAS also becomes tendency within the MMM known as "working class in the vanguard" tendency. Preparation towards strike in sugar industry unions, for recognition and against mill closures, and against Industrial Relations Act. Literally hundreds of union public meetings.
LALIT DE KLAS holds first of its annual (or more) Residential Seminars that until today are part of LALIT's tradition.
Active LALIT DE KLAS members already include the late Ah-Fong Chung, Madu Lew Chin, Cadet Couyava, Vijay Ram, Rajiati Chegebroyam, Vijay Sukhoo, the late Liliane Simonet, Darma Heereea, Serge Rayapoullee, Madeven Samynaden.
SOLIDARITE FAM women's common front that will exist for some 25 years held its first outdoor mass women's meeting at Company Gardens. Later Lalit's WOMEN'S COMMISSION a member of the Front.
LALIT DE KLAS is the leadership of the country's biggest ever national-level general strike movement. This ends in victory after a hunger strike by leaders of the movement, including Ram Seegobin (no food, no water for four days). This general strike movement is what makes LALIT still an important political force until today; it is carved indelibly into the collective memory that LALIT stood by the working class in its most advanced and most demanding and bravest struggle of all its history. Important conflict at the end of the hunger strike, between Paul Berenger line which was to go to bed and then think about things on a clear head (which would lead to the silly-minded Group de 30) and Ram Seegobin's line which was for the drivers and conductors who were ready to do so, to take their buses out, break the bosses' lockout, and buy petron with money from the fairs, leading to a workers' takeover. Paul Berenger got a majority, playing on genuine fatigue of the working class delegates, after 3 weeks of challenging bourgeois power every minute.
LALIT DE KLAS leads the huge mass movement, with mass demonstrations all over the country, in support of the hunger strike at the GWF offices in Moka Street, so to get implementation of the Agreement reached after 1979 strike and hunger strike. Ends in victory.
LALIT DE KLAS has majority at MMM delegates Assembly, but Paul Berenger still controls the mass movement. He will begin to work towards allying with Harish Boodhoo and for consensus with bosses.
LALIT DE KLAS works closely with the Chagossians (then called Zilwa), in mobilization campaigns to close the Diego Garcia base, get reparations, and re-unite Mauritius. Two LALIT members, Ragini Kistnasamy and Lindsey Collen amongst the eight women arrested, tried and found not guilty under the Public Order Act for illegal demonstration on the Diego Garcia issue.
LALIT weekly newspaper, Lagazet LALIT DE KLAS born, sold in 1,000 to 2,000 copies every week over the next two or three years. Its name lives on as the umbrella title for our publication of leaflets, magazines, occasional papers and web site.
MMM's double shift towards "consensus with the bosses" and "allilance with the Harish Boodhoo PSM', which LALIT DE KLAS calls treason against the MMM's own struggles against capitalism and communalism (ethnic/religious divisions) respectively. LALIT DE KLAS members provoke MMM Delegates Assembly, MMM leadership threatens resignation if they lose and put pressure on individual delegates to absent themselves. LALIT DE KLAS gets 20% of the vote, and all LALIT members resign and form LALIT party.
For the 1982 elections, LALIT's mo-dord, however, is to vote for the MMM-PSM, but on the basis of only 10 points in their programs. MMM-PSM wins all 60 Parliamentary seats.
Later in the year, LALIT puts candidates up for the first time under its banner, during Municipal elections.
LALIT sets up its Documentation Centre, led by Ragini Kistnasamy who had trained in Switzerland in the women's movement there in inter-active filing. LALITs "Sant Dok" includes a magnificent series of local cuttings, chosen, cut and pasted and meticulously filed into 100 LALIT-chosen headings for easy retrieval and reference by any party member preparing a speech, article or just studying. Also includes left publications from abroad, e.g. in 2007 we receive by exchanges and subscriptions GREEN LEFT WEEKLY from Australia, New Left Review from the UK, The Spokesman from UK, Monthly Review from the USA, and Imprecor from France, News and Letters from the USA.
LALIT expands so rapidly its members cannot keep up with new branches. This lasts until the MMM splits into the MMM and MSM (including PSM), when, with elections coming up and the first-past-the-post system, many of our new recruits go back to the MMM or MSM -- mainly to the one they think of as a lesser evil. LALIT puts up candidate for General Elections on the basis of LABREZ program ("first Labrez"), and over the next 25 years will, when necessary field candidates. Electorally speaking, LALIT has been weak (less than 1% - 30% in different elections), and yet LALIT is over the years equal to or larger than (according to opinion polls) many parties that are in alliances in the Government and Opposition blocks today (PMSD, PMXD, MR, Les Verts); LALIT has not found mainstream parties fit allies.
The workers education organization Ledikasyon pu Travayer buys a building at Grand River North West for its printing and publishing co-operative, and LALIT rents space for its headquarters in it, until today.
LALIT shifts from being close to what was the most dynamic section of the Trade Union movement to a conscious politics of being close to ALL the Trade Unions, concentrating specifically not at the level of relationships with the bureaucratic leaderships, but at the level of the shop floor, and not being closer to any one federation. This strategy called "Labaz Intersindikal" broke with an old Mauritian tradition of unions controlled by political parties, and is still LALIT's trade union strategy. From 1983 onwards, LALIT also began to build its close relationship with the women's movement, in particular the Muvman Liberasyon Fam and our Women's Commission was member of the Solidarite Fam common front. LALIT was also instrumental over the years in setting up numerous common fronts, on a range of subjects that have maintained LALIT's reputation on these issues until the present: Transport workers-users Front (FKT), Anti-apartheid front (SOMAAP), Anti-War Front (KAL), Anti-Imperialist Front (KKAI), Fron pu Demokrasi (that influenced history in getting Public Order Act repealed, and proposing new Industrial law to replace IRA, but more importantly developed the approach of attacking a law from general philosophical stand-points, not only on a clause by clause attack that stays within the logic of the repressive law), Anti-Bush Front, to name a few.
LALIT runs the "Disik, Ki Lavenir?" campaign, but the slide shows we hold get banned by the Police.
LALIT continues its ongoing work on producing "programs" and has a long, weekly "program meeting" (with a meal in the middle) to which all full members are invited, and to which the LALIT Commissions (on education, health, unions, women's commission, language and so on) which also include supporting members, contribute. Over the next three years, LALIT publishes (in addition to Peoples' Health, and Labrez No. 1 already published, Programs on Why Mauritius Should become a Republic and what this means (it finally became a Republic in 1992), on Voluntary Sterilization which was/is illegal, on Village and Town Local Democracy, on Internationalism and Anti-Imperialism, on Drugs, and Labrez No. 2 for the next general elections. Active leading members now include Rex Stephen.
A first-ever in the country, there were five woman candidates from LALIT in one Ward for the Municipal Elections (Anne-Marie Sophie, Liliane Simonet, Agnes Hevia-Mouvima, Lindsey Collen and Mimose Therese).
LALIT begins a long and lively struggle for security of employment, starting with a campaign on this for the casual workers employed by the Development Works' Corporation, and this led to a big strike some years later, cases against our members. Veena Dholah, then a member, was charged with illegally posting up support posters, and Ram Seegobin and Rajni Lallah for participating in an illegal march, and all three were eventually found not guilty. The striking workers were sacked, all 800 of them, during Berenger and Jugnauth government, by DWC who the Court in theyear 2000 found had acted illegally and ordered to pay tens of millions of rupees as punitive severence allowance to the workers.
In the General Elections LALIT fields 42 candidates on the basis of the Labrez 2 Program. This was successfully organized, following the disastrous capitulation of the other left party OMT-FNAS which was in an electoral alliance with LALIT. The OMT-FNAS capitulated under pressure from Paul Berenger and MMM to break off the alliance. MMM pressure included a scandalous special MMM newspaper, Le Militant, containing completely fabricated infamy against LALIT, subsequently proven to have been invented for this purpose.
REVI LALIT begins to come out. It is an offset magazine (the first popular magazine in Mauritius). A4 format, 32 page monthly magazine. Comes out for the next four or five years.
LALIT holds forums and meetings all over the country to interpret events in the USSR and Eastern Europe, especially the contradictory movements of Perestroika (for restoring capitalism, through what turned out to be the development of a kind of mafia) and Glasnost (for increasing democracy and developing freedom within the context of already nationalized production).
At Bye-Election in Vacoas-Phoenix, Rajni Lallah, is candidate, and LALIT successfully puts anti-apartheid on the agenda of the election, as the seat had become vacant because MMM MP Collendavelloo had resigned after a scandal involving his having supported* Sol Kerzner, South African hotel tycoon.
LALIT members Ram Seegobin and Ashok Subron attend the Barcelona Conference of the Open World Conference. This leads to the setting up with WOSA and the FDP of the Comoros of the Indian Ocean Network, which continues as a supplement in REVI LALIT for a few years.
Lindsey Collen is LALIT candidate in by-election in Plaine Verte and Roche Bois, for replacement of Cassam Uteem who becomes President of the Republic. LALIT candidate gets more votes than Sylvio Michel of Les Verts and Jack Bizlall of PMT.
LALIT militants set up the MUVMAN LAKAZ, a homeless peoples' mass movement, in protest against the closure of the Central Housing Authority. Muvman Lakaz is then in a long-lasting informal alliance with the workers retrenched by this closure (homeless people together with sacked house-builders for the poor) and the sacked DWC workers, who had also built amenities for people (housing estates, cyclone refugee sheltersbazaars, toilets, village halls, etc.). Great victories of MUVMAN LAKAZ include getting Government to provide low cost housing for illegal squatters in Richelieu (in 2000) and elsewhere, and getting government to change its entire housing policy in favour of the poor. The alliance between Muvman Lakaz, CHAEU and Construction and Allied Workers Union gets support of the whole of the trade union movement, leadership and all, and this, amongst other factors, enables the formation of the All Workers' Conference which united the Unions from 1996 to 1999.
LALIT members set up Movement Against Communalism (MAC) in which 15 organizations made major theoretical advances on the issue of race and religious classification, and against the infamous Best Loser System.
LALIT leading member, Lindsey Collen, suffers campaign designed to hound her out, run by handful of fundamentalists and the Jugnauth Government over her novel, THE RAPE OF SITA, for supposedly being blasphemous. A long political battle ensues, around the issues of free expression, art, religious fundamentalism, communalism, and in the end LALIT wins the battle, and the book is four years later back on the shelves, having won the Commonwwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, and now having been published in seven international editions, including translations.
LALIT and PMT in Platform Parasol to contend the two bye-elections in Stanley and Rose-Hill to replace Berenger and L'Estrac who resigned from the National Assembly in a macho feudal confrontation. PMT never got over the election results, and would finally disappear some time between 2000 and 2003.
LALIT leading members Rajni Lallah and Alain Ah-Vee attend Open World Conference in Slovakia.
LALIT members work towards the All Workers' Conference, which joins together all the trade unions and federations, together with Ledikayon pu Travayer, the workers' education association. AWC opposes privatization, globalization, factory closures, mill closures. Trade Union bureaucrats who had previously so lost credibility as to have been unable to attend workers' meetings specially in the sugar industry, regain access to their own bases, through LALIT, but the same bureaucrats, while "permitting" their delegate-level members to come to big assemblies, obviously sabotage mobilization at the grass roots level. In 1999, the All Workers' Conference implodes. LALIT from then onwards carefully works once again towards links with the base of the Unions, not with the bureaucracies, and more importantly puts renewed emphasis on the development of not just defensive strategies, but counter-attacks on the bourgeoisie and Government for their role in permitting the looming economic crisis.
LALIT attends International Conference in Cape Town hosted by WOSA and that leads to setting up of International Network for Socialist Action, which suffers failed attempts at using internet for the first time to set up a network and does, for political reasons, not live long.
LALIT holds South East African Forum meeting, as a logical conclusion to Indian Ocean Network, set up in 1991. Attended by PMT, WOSA and delegates from Re-Union political organizations.
LALIT sets up Rann Nu Diego Committee with many other organizations including the Chagos Refugees Group in order to successfully put the issue on the national agenda once again.
After the 1999 mass rebellion following the death in custody of the famous singer, Kaya, LALIT challenges and is now winning, the historic interpretation of this event as a strong, spontaneous expression of young peoples' rage at police violence, on a background of the beginnings of the return of unemployment and insecure, seasonal, contractual employment. LALIT holds meetings all over the Islands and collects the true stories of the rebellion. LALIT publishes a counter-report to the official Matadeen Report. As LALIT DE KLAS had been involved in the struggle to elucidate the death in detention after the Prison Mutiny of 1979 of Serge Victorine, and had from then onwards been a forum for highlighting police brutality, LALIT in position to work, together with the Mouvement pour le Progres de Roche Bois, with some lawyers, and the womens' movement, the MLF, at the ground-work for what will later become the Association, JUSTICE: AGAINST VIOLENCE BY OFFICERS OF THE STATE, which was born in 2002 to unite victims and their families with political and social activists to end torture and violence, and from then onwards some of our members are active in it. The Association has helped to begin the end of impunity for police and prison officers.
Occasional LALIT DE KLAS magazine NEWS & VIEWS published, and continues for a few years.
LALIT supports Nouvo Lizur candidate Jocelyne Minerve in bye-election.
Ram Seegobin attends Open World Conference in San Francisco and speaks on Diego Garcia issue at International Tribunal in Los Angeles.
LALIT begins what will be a three-year campaign against every single political force in the country, and with support from villagers who believe in democracy, for the maintaining, and then, when that battle was lost, for the re-instating of Village Elections - a struggle that ended in outright victory in 2005, when elections were re-instated.
With private radio for the first time in history, there are three new stations, and the languages of the people are on the air. One of the peoples' favourite guests on private radio stations is LALIT leading member, Ram Seegobin, who explains difficult issues so simply in Kreol.
Publication of LALIT 250 page book DIEGO GARCIA IN TIMES OF GLOBALIZATION, due for George Bush's planned visit to Mauritius (visit did not happen because of invasion of Iraq).
Demonstration against the AGOA Forum organized by Front Against Bush's politics. LALIT holds Regional Political Forum with speakers from South Africa and Reunion.
Publication of LALIT's key program on Language, specially on the use of the mother tongue, as process of developing cognition of a child. Publication of Program on Ecology and the Environment, and another key program booklet on Women's Liberation.
LALIT begins a more conscious support of Palestine peoples' struggle against US and State of Israel, which continues until today. LALIT member Alain Ah-Vee participates in walk Jenin to Jerusalem against apartheid wall, and Ragini Kistnasamy goes to Haresh to womens' centre, "The House" from where they support people in their daily lives under occupation. Two report-backs well-attended.
LALIT is part of a joint delegation with the Chagos Refugees Group to the World Social Forum in Mumbai for the specific reason of contributing to the first face-to-face meeting of the network-in-formation then called NO U.S. Bases.
LALIT publishes its bilingual program on FREEDOM, and Program on Workers' Rights.
Ledikasyon pu Travayer (workers' education association close to LALIT,) receives the WORLD LITERACY PRIZE, and uses the money to complete its upstairs hall.
LALIT members Ram Seegobin and Lindsey Collen charged and found not guilty of "molesting police", in incident when police officers in fact threatened then LALIT member, George Legallant.
LALIT does national launch of its Program for an Alternative Political Economy, which will be major political work of the next few years.
LALIT puts up 30 candidates in General election, and it campaign includes challenges against sugar and cane as the basis of the economy.
Publication of 224 page book AGAINST COMMUNALISM OF THE BEST LOSER SYSTEM.
LALIT for the first time gets over 100,000 visits in a year to its web-site.
The LALIT and LALIT members' political graphics, mainly the artistic creations of LALIT leading member, Alain Ah-Vee, feature strongly in the UPFRONT AND PERSONAL retrospective exhibition of "Three Decades of Political and Social Graphics (Mauritius)" prepared by the British Council.
Komisyon Zenn Lalit is set up, following previous party youth work in Youth in Struggle, and later in Grup Zenn Lalit.
LALIT, jointly with former President of the Republic, Cassam Uteem, organizes night candle vigil in support of people of Lebanon and Palestine.
LALIT holds International Theoretical Seminar, and publishes papers in 220-page bilingual book.
LALIT's challenges to the education program get massive support after publication of PROGRAM ON EDUCATION: FOR EQUALITY IN EDUCATION, FOR EQUALITY IN SOCIETY. This is part of re-newed and ongoing until today updating of classical theoretical work. Joint meeting held with the Catholic Church (with whom our relations were previously strained) on the Program.
Death of LALIT leading member for many years, Liliane Simonet.
LALIT members participate in LPT's week of Artists Against Repression, which includes first of two jazz concerts, including Rajni Lallah as pianist.
After preparing a "national conference" (thwarted by a Cyclone Gamede) but succeeding in forming a Platform Against Military Bases signed by 22 organizations, LALIT sets up, together with other organizations world-wide, the NO BASES network at a meeting in Ecuador.
LALIT's documentation prepares to go electronic, under the guidance of members, Ragini Kistnasamy and Cindy Clelie.
LALIT holds multi-media young peoples' Spring University, following other previous "universities" and cadre schools for young people.
As part of the ongoing Program for an Alternative Political Economy, LALIT, produces a DVD film on the issues around the collapse of sugar, as the main backbone of the economy. The film is designed to enable all members to launch into chairing meetings on the politics of difficult economic issues. By 2007, all key issues in the LALIT program for an alternative political economy are on the national agenda of the country: food security, land use, agricultural diversification and job creation, agrarian reform, clean power, control of rupee value, unemployment benefit.
LALIT holds Report Back from Palestine, jointly with MLF, at which Ragini Kistnasamy compares her first visit to volunteer in Palestine in 2004 with her second.
LALIT, after years of working against the hysteria the right-wing whips up around drugs, successfully launches a "Charter on Aids and a Rational Drug-Addiction Policy", signed up so far by 10 organizations.
Hugely successful 3-day LALIT International Congress held in February 2008 with over 160 participants from all over the country.
Launch of Palestine Diaries by LALIT leading member, Ragini Kistnasamy.
All LALIT issues come centre-stage in national politics, viz. food security, alternative economy issues, Diego Garcia military base, Best Loser System, mother-tongue in education.
New series of “political education” launched.
LALIT`s magazine
REVI LALIT
on sale now @ Rs20.
For subscriptions,
contact lalitmail@intnet.mu
