Ex-QDMS
C�MERE, YOU POTENTIAL VOTER, YOU! Amichand Rajbansi kisses baby Kitana Jade Pillay while helping residents at the Minority Front�s Phoenix office
WHEN social networks buzzed with speculation that Amichand Rajbansi had died in October, perhaps his wife, Shameen Thakur Rajbansi, in dispelling the rumour, captured the life and history of her husband most aptly by describing him as the proverbial “cat with nine lives”.
After all, Rajbansi’s political obituary had been written several times, only for him to bounce back.
But a doctor did finally pronounce the end for the master political schemer yesterday. Arguably the country’s most colourful politician, he was a powerful debater and the longest-serving political player in KwaZulu-Natal.
Astute political manoeuvres and an ability to reinvent himself saw Rajbansi, popularly known as the “Bengal Tiger”, dancing with both the apartheid government, serving in its tricameral parliament, and then forming alliances with his former arch-rivals, the ANC.
Rajbansi had stints as a wrestler and football referee before moving to politics, where he was reviled and admired in equal measure.
Hated by Indian activists aligned to the then Natal Indian Congress/ANC alliance, who labelled him a “sell-out” prepared to go to bed with the Nationalists, he was revered by a sizeable portion of the Indian community, who saw him as their saviour.
MINORITY Front leader Amichand Rajbansi gears up for the 2004 election
Ex-QDMS
Rajbansi’s house was bombed by an ANC activist for his participation in the tricameral parliament in 1985.
Controversy struck his political career several times but he always overcame it.
Having formed the National People’s Party (NPP) in 1981, Rajbansi won the Arena Park, Chatsworth, seat for the NPP in the first tricameral elections in August 1984, became chairman of the Delegates’ Ministers’ Council and was appointed minister without portfolio in PW Botha’s cabinet later that year.
In December 1988, after two investigations by parliamentary committees, the James Commission described him as “arrogant”, “unscrupulous”, “ruthless” and a “mean-minded bully”, and he was sacked him from the cabinet and the Ministers’ Council.
The commission’s final report found that Rajbansi had lied to Parliament, committed statutory perjury and misused his position. It recommended that he never again be employed in any post which called for integrity.
In 1991 he was ordered to pay former Delegates MP Pat Poovalingam R50 000 plus costs for a defamatory letter describing Poovalingam as a “gutterish liar” after Poovalingam had accused Rajbansi of taking bribes and of corruption in property deals.
Nelson Mandela and Amichand Rajbansi
Ex-QDMS
This was supposed to mark Rabjansi’s end in politics, but he became a key player in the negotiations for a new SA at Kempton Park, where he grabbed headlines when he was slapped by the late AWB leader Eugene Terreblanche.
In 1994, Rajbansi renamed the NPP the Minority Front. He helped the ANC take both the province and eThekwini and was made the Sports and Recreation MEC in return.
He would have turned 70 in January.
