Davendra Singh
Fijian politician
Davendra Singh (born 1950) was a Fiji Indian small businessman and politician who came into prominence when he challenged and defeated the official National Federation Party (NFP) candidate in a by-election in March 1985.
The Lautoka Indian Communal seat became vacant in April 1984 following the resignation of the former leader of the NFP, Jai Ram Reddy. When a supporter of Sidiq Koya from Ba, Dr Balwant Singh Rakkha, was selected to contest the by-election by the NFP, Davendra Singh, who was a virtual unknown, saw his chance at political glory. He managed to persuade the NFP Youth Wing, which had earlier been shunned by Koya, to support him to oppose Rakkha. He demanded that a local person be selected by NFP for the vacant seat but when he was ignored by the Party, he nominated himself for the election. (The by-election was delayed due to damage caused by a hurricane.) He had the support of the former Flower faction and also claimed Reddy's support. For his part, Reddy did not openly campaign for either candidate. During the campaign, Koya turned the election into a referendum on himself, and threatened to resign if Rakkha lost. The result was a narrow win for Singh by 2209 votes to Rakkha's 2196 votes in an election in which only 4421 of the 12,260 registered voters cast their votes. Koya did not go ahead with his threat to resign but challenged the results in the Supreme Court of Fiji, which confirmed Singh's election.
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This entry incorporates text from “Davendra Singh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.