ABSTRACT
Fiji celebrated its 40th year of independence from Britain in 2010. In all this time Fiji had only 13 years of continuous democratic rule by the Alliance Party (except for a brief lull in 1977). The other 27 tumultuous years saw the execution of six coups. These coups were violent manifestations of political and sociocultural tensions associated with horizontal inequalities, real and perceived, between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians who were brought to Fiji in the late nineteenth century by the British under an indentured labour scheme to work on the sugar plantations (Ali 1982; Lal 1992). The potentially explosive impact of inter-ethnic differences were recognized by colonial and post-colonial elites who consciously devised pro-indigenous Fijian affirmative action programmes that preceded and followed the coups in a desperate attempt to asphyxiate further aggravation of iridescent ethnic tensions (Ratuva 2002, 2005).
