Ask Mariappan He led GOPIO Malaysia for six years and lost eight of them in Mauritius. Two diaspora conventions open here this weekend. He will not be at either.

Subramaniam Mariappan is a Malaysian Tamil. He was President of GOPIO Malaysia from 2000 to 2006. He was also the man behind CT Power, the company that spent eight years trying to build a power station in this country and never laid a stone. He puts what he lost at more than fourteen million United States dollars, and he has confirmed this to me himself. When he speaks about the organisation he once led, the word he uses is useless.

This weekend Mauritius hosts two gatherings of the Indian diaspora at once. The 13th World Tamils Economic Conference at Réduit, and the 16th GOPIO International Convention at Trou-aux-Biches, both from 11 to 13 September. Both will speak of business opportunity. Both will call Mauritius a gateway to Africa. Neither, one imagines, will mention him.

Eight years

The plan was a coal-fired plant at Pointe aux Caves, Albion. The application went in during 2007, and in December 2008 the Central Electricity Board signed a power purchase agreement with the company. The environmental licence was refused in 2011. Mariappan appealed, the Environment Appeal Tribunal decided in CT Power’s favour, and the licence came through in 2013. Then in March 2015 the Cabinet dropped the project, saying the promoters had not shown evidence of their financial capacity. CT Power disputed that, and the Supreme Court accepted there were grounds to seek a judicial review. Eight years, an agreement with the CEB, a tribunal victory and a licence in hand, and nothing was ever built.

Who holds the sector

To understand what he was walking into, look at who produces electricity in this country. About sixty per cent of it comes from independent producers rather than the CEB, and those producers are in the main the big sugar groups: Terragen, Omnicane, Alteo. Their thermal plants at Belle Vue, Saint-Aubin and Savannah, some 195 megawatts between them, were designed and built and are operated by Albioma, a French company, together with those Mauritian partners. This did not happen by accident. Until the mid-1990s the CEB produced the country’s electricity itself. Then, on the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, production was opened to private hands, at precisely the moment when sugar was becoming less profitable and the great estates were looking for something else to do with their bagasse and their capital. The sugar houses moved into power and have been there ever since. The terms matter too. The CEB must buy the private producers’ electricity first and run its own stations only for whatever is left. Movements in the coal price, in freight, in exchange rates and in taxes are passed through into what the producers charge. The CEB carries the risk, the producers carry very little, and the bill arrives at the end with the consumer.

That is the position an outsider was proposing to enter. Not a market with room in it, but a settled arrangement between a small number of houses, working with a French operator, on contracts that guarantee them a buyer and protect them from their own costs. A Mauritian newspaper wrote at the time about lobbying against the Malaysian project, said to be funded by private interests with a stake in seeing it fail. That was an allegation and it was never proved, and this article does not repeat it as fact. What is not an allegation is the ownership. Anyone can look up who runs our power stations.

After Bahadoor

Mariappan is not asking for compensation, and he does not pretend a failed venture is anybody’s fault but the market’s. His question is simpler and harder. What was the point of the grouping?

On this he is precise, and he draws a line at a particular death. While the late Dhundev Bahadoor was alive, he says, GOPIO in Mauritius meant something. Bahadoor had brought the organisation to this island and treated it as serious work, and it was he, with the late Baleshwar Agarwal of India, who began the PIO Dialogue with India in 2003. There was somebody to call. After Bahadoor went, in Mariappan’s account, the seriousness went with him. The chapter here was not supportive. What replaced the work, in his own blunt phrase, was party time.

There is a further reason, and in Mauritius it is not thought polite to say it. GOPIO here is in practice an organisation of the majority Indo-Mauritian community, the descendants of the Bhojpuri-speaking north, from Bihar and the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh. That is not a plot, it is arithmetic. They are by far the largest group of Indian origin on this island, and any body speaking for Indians in Mauritius will end up looking like them. But arithmetic has consequences. A committee drawn overwhelmingly from one community attends to that community’s concerns first, without anybody intending harm by it, and a Tamil from Kuala Lumpur with a difficulty at Albion was never going to be anybody’s priority. GOPIO Mauritius states on its own website that it unites all persons of Indian origin. That is a good sentence. It is also a testable one.

The men who are still there

Mookhesswur Choonee heads GOPIO in Mauritius and is described on GOPIO’s own Mauritian website as President of GOPIO International. He is also a former Mauritian minister, fourteen years in government, nine of them as Minister of Arts and Culture, and later High Commissioner of Mauritius to India. For most of the years in which CT Power was moving through this country’s institutions, he sat in the Cabinet of Mauritius. Bijaye Madhoo likewise remains associated with the organisation.

This newspaper makes no accusation against either man. Neither was obliged to intervene in a private commercial matter, and it is entirely possible that neither was ever asked to. But both are men of standing in a body that tells people of Indian origin, in its own words, that membership gives them a worldwide network across forty countries offering business opportunities and mutual support. Mariappan’s position is that no such support ever reached him. We invite both men, publicly and courteously, to say what they knew at the time, whether they were approached, and what if anything they did. Whatever they answer will be printed here in full.

What arrives this weekend

Delegates coming from Malaysia pay around six thousand ringgit. For that they receive return flights, six nights at a beachfront hotel, dinner every evening, the gala, and two full days of guided tours of the island. At the business conference on Saturday morning the anthems play at two minutes past ten, five dignitaries speak in succession, and the coffee break comes at a quarter to eleven, before a single item of business is reached. Nor is Mariappan alone in his view. A GOPIO representative from Malaysia, speaking on condition that he not be named, put it in one line: the organisation has become more of an old retirement club than anything else. That is unkind, and it comes from inside the house, and looking at Saturday’s programme it is hard to argue with. There is nothing shameful in people enjoying a weekend among friends. But nobody should confuse it with support.

What to ask on Saturday???

For those attending, four questions, asked at the microphone rather than quietly in the corridor. What can a person of Indian origin actually do, through this organisation, when a venture in another PIO country goes wrong? Has the organisation ever intervened for a member in such a case, and if so, when and for whom? How many Tamils have served on the committee of GOPIO Mauritius in the last twenty years? And why did the man who led GOPIO Malaysia from 2000 to 2006 lose eight years and his investment in this country without anybody in this organisation lifting a finger? If there are good answers, this newspaper will print them gladly and in full. If there are none, then Mariappan has answered his own question, and the rest of us should stop pretending otherwise.

Corrections and responses from GOPIO International, GOPIO Mauritius or GOPIO Malaysia will be published in full.