1. A Fortunate son
Former Fiji politician KC Ramrakha, ran
afoul of the Indian-
dominated National Federation Party
during the faction fighting of 1977. He
speaks to Drum Pasifika about politics,
sugar and life.
Photos and story: Iva Tora

3. As a student from Fiji arriving for the first time in Australia
to study at Sydney University, Karam Chand Ramrakah
would probably never have guessed that he would one day
return permanently to make a life in this new country.
Back in the early 50s, this former Fiji union leader and
politician shared a house with his two younger brothers in
Annandale that their father had bought. KC was studying law
while his twin brothers studied medicine at Sydney Uni.
In the days before gentrification, Annandale’s residents were
the pre-dawn risers, the rough-hewn labourers, the 40-hour-a-
week cogs in the city’s engine room. These were the salt of
Sydney’s working classes – weaned on a mantra of the
Protestant work ethic, picket fences and White Australia.
But at 16 Taylor Street, they would appear in droves and there
in the sparsely furnished lounge, amid the heady fragrances of
marsala and unfamiliar scents wafting in from the kitchen,
they would forget their colour differences in return for free
medical care and legal advice from its young occupants.
The semi-detached cottage at 16 Taylor must have stood out
as a beacon of the cultural rainbow on the distant horizon.
“It was like a temple for anyone who didn’t have anywhere to
sleep,” KC recalls fondly of those days. We would cook rotis
and curries for the working people there – they were happy to
have two med students there tending to their medical causes,”
he says.
“We also had an SP bookmaker there so the entire family
became mad on gambling.”

4. Conveniently, they may have forgotten to mention this to their
father and patron, Odin Ramrakha, who’d have contemplated
more enlightened notions of achieving darshana. One
suspects gambling wasn’t one of them.
“We formed a sort of a village in Annandale; everyone used
to use our address as a post office.”
Just how did the brothers' patron, an ordinary public servant
from a developing country, manage to buy a house in the
middle of white Australia, is a story worth retelling. Odin had
joined Fiji’s colonial civil service in 1911 as a court clerk
interpretor, rising to become a leading civil servant in the
judicial system by 1953..
Fiji, like Australia and most of the European colonial outposts
of the 50s, had an unofficial apartheid system.
Fijians had to obtain passes if they wanted a drink at the local
pub. No Fijian could become a member of the exclusive
Royal Suva Yacht Club. British establishments like the
Defence club was out of bounds to Fijians and Indians.
Schools were racially segregated and travel for a majority of
Fijians was restricted from one part of the country to another
– unless prior approval and official documentation had been
issued.
The colonial masters maintained an iron-clad grip on the
movements, pockets and lives of their genuflecting citizens.
Odin manoeuvred his way deftly across this minefield of rules
and regulations that governed every aspect of a person’s life.
A resourceful man, if ever there was, who probably invented
the word networking, Odin bought a house with money he’d
saved in an area KC describes as a “European enclave”.

7. « prevnext »
The move was enough to incense Frank Ryan, the son-in-law
of Sir Allport Barker, scion of the Fiji Times and pillar of the
establishment, that a coloured man had had the temerity to
buy a house in the area. Ryan issued a writ but never served it.
“I don’t know what happened, I can only guess that he might
have been told that you can’t do it,” KC speculates. “You
can’t stop people from buying property.”
By the time he retired, Odin had earned a pension worth
£1,000 and an insurance policy worth the same amount. The
property that may never have been his, but for the mysterious
hand of providence, was sold for £2,000.
Across the Pacific, Australia’s White Australia policy was
firmly entrenched so most people in Fiji would send their
children to New Zealand to study. But ever the trailblazer,
Odin knew a Mrs Iris Hunt of a leading travel agency in town
called Hunts Travel and promptly arranged with her to acquire
visas for his boys to study in Australia.
“With that money and the visas etc, he could send us to
Australia,” his eldest says with pride.
KC travelled extensively in childhood and during his early
years of schooling.
He was born in 1933 in Nabouwalu in Bua in Fiji’s second
largest island and attended various schools from one end of
Fiji to the other.

8. Marist Brothers
and Sydney
The Ramrakha family made several moves, including to
remote outposts where KC remembers having to walk six
miles to and from school.
He finally completed what was then known as the Cambridge
Certificate – with record passes – at the prominent Maris
Brothers College in Suva. After completing his law degree, he
was admitted, at the age of 22, to the New South Wales bar.
Because he looked so young, KC had difficulty getting a job
in a law firm back in Fiji, which depressed his father who
suggested opening an office in Labasa – a one street-town that
was the capital of Fiji’s second largest island. His son had
other ideas.
“I said ‘no we will open an office in Suva.’ in our house at 65
Robertson Road.”
Suva at the time had a total of 35 lawyers. KC opened his law
firm, while his father ran for the Legislative Council elections
in 1953 and in ‘56 – and lost. Partaking in elections –
especially – was the domain of the privileged few.
“They were very restricted, you had to be literate, you had to
own property worth £75 or you had to have income worth £75
a year,” KC explains.

9. “It was a lot of money; it was restricted to the educated
elite...or earning elite.”
In 1966, Indian illiteracy was 80 per cent and even worse for
Indian women at 90 per cent. Herein lies the irony. Indigenous
Fijians, by contrast, were far more literate. “Every Fijian
village had a school, a nurse and a teacher so literacy was
almost 100 per cent.
That was largely to teach them the bible; every Fijian had a
bible; indeed every Fijian now has a bible. Fijians were lucky
in this sense.”
When KC became a commissioner for oaths in 1956, he
remembers entering a bookshop where there were three
identical bibles on display in different languages.
“The English version was 30 shillings, the Hindi was 15
shillings and Fijian one 7 shillings and 6 pence.
I’m 78 now but I can still remember everything like it was
yesterday; my wife gets sick of listening to me,” he says
laughing.
KC is an engaging raconteur, regaling the listener with stories
and anecdotes, rich in their description, animated in their
delivery. This septuagenarian has the eccentricity that folks
generally assume in the twilight of their lives.

11. The "vociferous young politican" has
mellowed with age and now has six
grandchildren, one of whom seen above, was
named after his father, Odin.
The kind that every family knows only too well and tolerates
even after flooding your email inbox with an avalanche of
miscellaneous items.
He confesses to being a luddite still grappling with technology
and the internet but the sheer volume of emails in my inbox
tells me the opposite.
He has a meticulous eye for detail in his storytelling and I get
the impression that nothing misses this gentleman with the
mind of a steel trap.
In Deryck Scarr’s biography of late Fijian statesman, Ratu Sir
Kamisese Mara (Tuimacilai), Karam Chand Ramrakha is
described as a “vociferous young” politician. In one
memorable passage, Scarr takes the reader back some 40
years when the young KC took a trip to Mauritius, of all
places, to present a tabua to the incoming president.
Back in Fiji, members of the i-Taukei (Indigenous Fijian)
establishment were none too happy that this improbable
neophyte looked like he’d lost his way while trying to find his
true calling. KC, for his part, simply thought he was doing it
as “the highest token that a Fijian could give.”
Although he had a powerbase entrenched within the sugar
growing areas of Fiji, KC had decided in 1959 that he would

12. never go into politics. He later had a change of heart when the
revered AD Patel, leader of the predominantly Indo-Fijian
National Federation Party, inducted him into the fold.
At the 1966 election for the Legislative Council, KC stood as
the NFP’s candidate, easily defeating two other candidates.
He soon forged a reputation as a masterful debator and was
made Opposition Whip in the Legislative Council.
In 1969, when the sugar contract between the Colonial Sugar
Refining Company (CSR) the sugarcane farmers was due to
expire in 1970, a dispute erupted between the company and
the growers.
The contract they had agreed on in 1961 was challenged by
the farmers who argued, among other things, that the
accounting procedures by CSR lacked transparency and that
they were essentially getting a bad deal. KC supported AD
Patel who represented the farmers in the arbitration
proceedings presided over by England’s pre-eminent judge,
Lord Alfred Denning.
"We argued that if Britain gave a guaranteed price for the
farmers, that price should be returned to farmers – 70 per cent
and also that the farmers should have a director or appoint an
accountant to oversee the company’s records,” KC explains.
The case was resolved when Denning created a formula for
working out prices and requiring CSR to have an accountant
inspect their accounts and report back to the farmers. The
Denning contract awarded the growers, 65 per cent and the
millers 35 per cent of the proceeds of all sale, including
molasses.

13. It further guaranteed the growers a minimum price of $7.75
per ton of cane paid in two instalments (Ref: Wikipedia). In
his ruling, Denning praised Patel for his marshalling of the
facts and brilliant presentation.
“Well, CSR didn’t want that, it said it couldn’t continue, it left
the country, it couldn’t control Fiji,” KC says.
When AD Patel died suddenly in October 1969, KC was not
appointed leader. That mantle was passed on to another
lawyer, Siddiq Koya, to the surprise of most within –and
probably outside — the party.
Mohammed Siddiq Koya
Relations between KC and Sid Koya deteriorated by the time
of the 1977 general election, an event that produced a pyhrric
victory for the NFP that was to set the course for the
remainder of KC’s life.
Despite the NFP securing a win at the ’77 polls, in-fighting
that was largely based on religious divisions and the splitting
of the party into various factions created a constitutional

14. crisis, forcing the-then Governor-General, Ratu Sir George
Cakobau to intervene and re-appoint the Alliance Party as
caretaker government.
Before Sitiveni Rabuka stormed into the pages of history, this
episode has gone down in some quarters as Fiji’s first coup
d’etat.
The NFP never quite recovered fully from this crisis which
impacted on the lives of many and set the tone of politics in
the years that followed.
The passing of time has a way of reshaping the sands of
memory, and subsequently, individual interpretations of
events. One detractor of KC lays the blame for the faction
fighting that erupted, squarely on his shoulders. Yet another
blames KC’s NFP cohort Irene Jai Narayan for the
factionalism -- but neither wishes to be identified.
As recently as 2004, former Fiji PM, Mahendra Chaudhry, in
his book Children of the Indus which gives a detailed history
of Fiji’s Indian community, claims KC and Mrs Jai Narayan
had spoken with Governor-General Cakobau and advised him
against appointing Koya as Prime Minister.

15. Mrs Irene Jai Narayan
According to Chaudhry, they had also allegedly advised
Cakobau that Koya did not have the total support of the party.
In September 2004, KC brought a libel suit against Chaudhry
and the National Farmers Union which published the book,
saying the allegations made in the book were false and would
damage his reputation.
“In 1981, I packed up my bags; I left because I became a gang
of one. Sid fell in the 77 elections and I had a falling out with
Jai Ram Reddy (who later took over the reins of the NFP) and
Mrs Jai Narayan. I felt they did not trust me and I did not
want to work with a leader who didn’t trust me...so I migrated
to Sydney,” says KC.
In suburban Sydney, KC and his wife, Usha were able to
claim a semblance of normality with their four children away
from the cut and thrust of politics.
The children have grown up, taken on professions and given
KC his six grandchildren. His eldest is a lawyer; a daughter

16. lives in New Zealand after having completed her Phd; his
third child is an auditor while the youngest works as a
superannuation consultant.
KC runs a legal practice in Putney, in Sydney’s north-west
where his cases take him back regularly to Fiji.
A prolific writer, during the 1987 coup, he wrote extensively
for the Sydney Morning Herald and other publications on
Fiji’s crisis.
As the man who’d written vast tracts of the 1970 constitution,
he was more uniquely placed than most to offer first-hand
insight into Fiji’s history after independence.
As for the current political scene in Fiji, KC believes he can
see what Frank Bainmarama is trying to achieve.
“What Frank is trying to do is neutralise the country and bring
it to one level playing field. The average person in Fiji is very
happy and is not affected by all the poison in the newspapers.
“The average person has not been affected by what’s been
reported. But the question is ‘where will it all end?’ and only
Frank can answer that.” KC is quick to add however that: “No
country in the world has been able to perpetuate military
power.”
Fifty years ago when he first arrived as a young
impressionable student in Australia, he may not have guessed
that Australia would be his home so many years later.
In many ways, however, KC never really left Fiji or rather,
Fiji never really left him. Every story, every dramatic account
of events, episodes and people that rolls off his lips is all
about his native homeland.

17. He has “never regretted” his decision to leave. It is obvious,
however, that a huge part of the island that he once called
home has remained affectionately with him, in some corner of
him, undiminished by the years.
********