Yadra vinaka Nirmal Singh Cheema,
I rarely respond to social media, but your post warrants an iTaukei perspective.
I read it with respect. Your appeal for equal dignity, accountability, and a Fiji where no citizen feels inferior is sincere and morally serious. Many iTaukei share that aspiration.
Yet your argument is framed in civic-nationalist terms, leaving little room for Fiji’s indigenous foundations. Perhaps that explains the silence of iTaukei. Silence is not agreement. It may reflect a feeling that our history, identity and relationship with land are missing.
Your comparison with India is unconvincing. India’s princely states were not Fiji’s chiefly confederacies. Our chiefs represented the vanua — a living relationship between land, people, ancestry, custom and spiritual obligation, not property.
The Deed of Cession was not a commercial transaction but an agreement between chiefs and the Crown, carrying reciprocal obligations to protect our people, land and customs. Native land was not extinguished. Over 90 per cent of Fiji remains under customary iTaukei ownership. Independence in 1970 did not erase this history. For iTaukei, the modern state’s legitimacy cannot be separated from that inheritance.
You argue Fiji belongs to all its citizens. In the civic sense, yes. But shared citizenship does not make every claim identical. For iTaukei, land is not merely property. It is ancestry, identity, kinship and spiritual continuity. Our deeper anxiety is cultural and political displacement: the fear of becoming just another ethnic community in our own homeland, expected to relinquish our distinctive place.
Your call for accountability is legitimate. No institution should be beyond scrutiny. But the BLV is not simply another influential body. It represents the traditional apex of iTaukei leadership and our connection to the vanua. Its removal from the 2013 Constitution was experienced not as reform but as a repudiation of our place in the national order. Its restoration affirms identity, continuity and indigenous dignity.
You rightly argue that tradition must serve the people. But accountability is not subordination to a civic state whose legitimacy is defined without indigenous history. For iTaukei, tradition is part of the foundation upon which the state rests.
Chiefly authority is not autocracy. A chief’s standing depends on relationships, service and the confidence of the people. Threats of violence must be condemned, but individual statements should not define the BLV as a whole.
Your account of Indo-Fijian suffering during the 1987 and 2000 coups is powerful. That suffering was real and deserves acknowledgement. But the iTaukei experience must also be acknowledged. Those coups were justified as indigenous protection, yet many iTaukei ask what they gained. The consequences included weakened institutions, damaged investor confidence, fractured communities and diminished trust. Fears about land, identity and political security were real, even when elites exploited them.
Your question — “What had we done to deserve this?” — is understandable. But another deserves equal consideration: “What have we gained?” Fiji cannot move beyond competing grievances without confronting both honestly.
Your appeal for equal citizenship is noble. The difficulty arises when indigenous rights are presented as privileges balanced against equality. Protections for iTaukei land, culture and traditional institutions are not concessions granted by the state. They arise from a prior relationship with land and historical commitments inherited by governments. Recognising these rights need not diminish the dignity of other citizens. Equality does not always require identical treatment where histories and obligations differ.
Your strongest observations concern iTaukei families struggling with poverty, housing, education and opportunity. These are central tests of whether indigenous institutions are fulfilling their responsibilities. Tradition must not excuse inequality within iTaukei society, just as indigenous rights must not justify inequality between citizens.
But your argument risks alienating iTaukei when it treats tradition and indigenous institutions principally as obstacles to overcome. A shared future cannot be built by asking one people to set aside the foundations of their identity to prove national loyalty.
The choice before Fiji is not between indigenous recognition and equal citizenship. It is whether we can build equal citizenship on a foundation that acknowledges our history, honours the iTaukei and protects the rights of every citizen.
The covenant cannot be set aside simply because the language of modern citizenship has changed. Nor should it be invoked to deny the legitimate aspirations of other communities. It must remain a shared responsibility: to protect the vanua, uphold the dignity of all citizens, and ensure neither history nor equality is weaponised against the other.
This is not a rejection of your vision for Fiji, Nirmal. It is an invitation to build upon an understanding of history — not only the citizenship we share today, but also the covenant from which our nationhood emerged.
