/ 19 April 2009

Paper tiger on the prowl

It’s early Saturday morning and Minority Front leader Amichand Rajbansi’s motorcade winds a sinuous path through the streets of the predominantly Indian township of Chatsworth, south of Durban.

”Say no to crime, poverty and the sidelining of minorities,” exhorts Rajbansi over a loudspeaker. His voice rattles the windows of the schizophrenic semi-detached houses: some have retained the austerity of their apartheid origins while, incongruently, their next-door neighbours have been pimped up through renovations.

People wander outside looking more bemused than inspired — but previous election results have confirmed this area as one of Rajbansi’s bastions.

Despite his checkered history, including participation in apartheid’s much-criticised 1980s tricameral Parliament, Rajbansi is the province’s sports minister. He levered into the position after forming a coalition with the ANC in 2004 — a stunt he had pulled five years before.

Nicknamed the Bengal Tiger, the 67-year-old has been called everything from a ”political survivor” to a ”political prostitute”. ”I will form an alliance with whichever political party gains the majority in this province,” Rajbansi unashamedly tells the Mail & Guardian.

”A minority voice gets swallowed up in a big party like the ANC or IFP, but it is louder if it comes through the voice of a coalition party like the MF,” he says. The MF won 1.85% of the KwaZulu-Natal vote in the 2004 general election.

With the Indian vote estimated at about 1.2-million in the last election, analysts suggest that it has the potential to act as a swing vote in the province. But political analyst Kiru Naidoo baulks at the suggestion that there is a homogenous Indian voting bloc: ”The Indian community has historically split its allegiance right across the political spectrum,” he says. ”The ANC, Black Consciousness Movement, PAC and Unity Movement all had powerful adherents from the Indian community. This was balanced against those who happily cosied up with the colonial and apartheid authorities, such as Rajbansi.”

He says that ”from a class angle the Indian community is deeply stratified. The desperately poor jostle alongside well-paid professionals or the comfortably wealthy. Economic or social class does not necessarily play itself out in voting behaviour.”

Rajbansi plays the political game like a ”maestro”, Naidoo says. His virtuosity, though, comes as much from dealing with the ”bread-and-butter” issues of minority politics as it does from manipulating racial paranoia in race-obsessed South Africa.

Three years ago the MF was heavily criticised for placing advertisements in local Chatsworth newspapers telling residents to ”keep blacks out” of the township. The Tiger weathered that storm, despite calls for him to be removed as MEC.

Ronnie Pillay, a 57-year-old unemployed Chatsworth resident, watching the motorcade go past, says he is unsure who to vote for and will decide ”when I’m standing in the line and I will hear how other people are voting — but Rajbansi has done a lot for the community here, especially with sport — I see him in the papers and on TV all the time”.

If there is one thing that is not contested about Rajbansi, it is his ability to optimise any photo opportunity available — whether it is his consistent popping up at ANC president Jacob Zuma’s court appearances or that infamous toupee-flying slap he received from an Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging member when the rightwingers stormed the Codesa talks in the early 1990s.

Rajbansi unashamedly brushed the latter incident off, saying: ”I appeared on CNN over 50 times; you can’t buy that sort of publicity. All publicity is good publicity.”

The twice-married father of five and former soccer referee has always proved adaptable: with the pro-Zuma faction controlling the eThekwini area, Rajbansi can regularly be heard on radio stations enthusing about the role alliance stalwart Moses Mabhida played in his formative political years.

”The ANC has found a willing ally in Rajbansi. His handful of seats has swung the balance in both the KwaZulu-Natal legislature and several municipal councils in the ANC’s favour. Going into this election he might still hold the trump card as to whether the ANC controls the region or not,” says Naidoo.

ANC activists from the Indian community, though, have become increasingly disillusioned with the political expediency of cosying up to Rajbansi. A rebellion of sorts erupted last year about the ANC’s leadership reneging on its non-racial past by colluding with an ”apartheid stooge” and there are suggestions that the Tiger will be put down by the ANC after this election.

Yet Rajbansi remains ”relaxed and optimistic” going into the elections next week, expecting to garner three national legislature seats and four in the province.