Anerood Jugnauth
Anerood Jugnauth was prime minister of Mauritius three times, for eighteen years in all, and its president for nine, the barrister who led the socialist MMM to the sixty-nil sweep of 1982 that ended Ramgoolam's fourteen years, split from it within a year to found his own party, and then governed the island's transformation from a sugar colony with a fifth of its people unemployed into the export-processing and tourist economy the World Bank called the Mauritian miracle, with full employment by the end of the 1980s and the highest income in Africa. He was the country's Lee Kuan Yew by his own comparison, knighted by the queen, and handed the office to his son. He was born in 1930 at Palma into a Hindu family of the sugar estates, read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and was a minister in the pre-independence governments of the 1960s before joining Berenger's Mauritian Militant Movement, the left-wing party of the 1970s strikes, as the Hindu leader it needed. The alliance won every seat in June 1982 and he was prime minister with Berenger as finance minister, and the two fell out over the devaluation the IMF demanded and over Creole as the national language. He founded the Militant Socialist Movement in 1983, won the election that year with Ramgoolam's Labour, and won again in 1987 and 1991. The miracle was the free port and the export zone, where Hong Kong capital and Mauritian women made textiles for Europe under the Lome convention's quotas, the sugar protocol's guaranteed price, the hotels on the beaches, and the offshore banking for India. The drug scandal of 1985, in which four of his deputies were arrested at Amsterdam airport with heroin, was the other side. He lost in 1995 to Navin Ramgoolam, came back in 2000 in alliance with Berenger, handed him the premiership in 2003 under their agreement and took the presidency, which he resigned in 2012 to return to opposition, and won the election of December 2014 at eighty-four. He passed the office to his son Pravind in January 2017, was minister mentor after, and died in June 2021. The World Court's advisory opinion that Britain must return the Chagos islands, which he had argued for at The Hague in 2018 at eighty-eight, was his last case.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Mauritian
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
