Sir Vijay Raghubar Singh, KBE (13 July 1931 – 25 September 2006) was an Indo-Fijian lawyer and politician who held Cabinet office in the 1960s and 1970s.
He graduated with a Law degree from the University of London[1] in 1953 after only two years, the shortest period of study permissible to sit the final examination.
The Federation Party had no hope of winning the seat and to confuse voters selected another Vijay Singh.
[3] This was not a ministerial post in the modern sense, as Singh and his fellow "members" comprised a minority of the Executive Council and were technically only advisers to the governor, who retained all power.
However, the portfolio, which encompassed Health, Education, Housing and Social Welfare, was upgraded to a ministerial position when responsible government was introduced in September 1967.
He played an active part in multi-party talks held in London, culminating in the new constitution and Fiji's independence in 1970.
In mid-1975, when the Minister of Education announced that the Government would not subsidize school fees for non-Fijians, Vijay Singh was among its most vocal critics, describing the decision as "deplorable because of its distressingly repellent odour of crude racialism."
In 1985 he resigned his seat in the House of Representatives and began work as chief executive of the Sugar Cane Growers Council but this career was cut short by the Fiji coups of 1987.
Singh's last public contribution was his book, Speaking Out, published in 2006, in which he recited his version of the events surrounding the coups in Fiji.
[citation needed] Singh's memoir also made controversial claims that Sitiveni Rabuka, the architect of the 1987 coups, had personally told him that he was the main instigator behind the scenes of the 2000 coup also, and that his main target was not the government of Mahendra Chaudhry, but the aging Ratu Mara, who was now president.
In an audio interview broadcast on Fiji Live on 17 August, barely six weeks before his death, Singh claimed that an emotional Ratu Mara, who had abruptly resigned the Presidency in the midst of the coup crisis, had told him of his own suspicions about Rabuka.
Although unsubstantiated, Singh's claims were not new: Mara's own last recorded interview had expressed strong suspicions about Rabuka's possible involvement in the 2000 coup.
[citation needed] Sir Vijay R. Singh died on 25 September 2006 in Brisbane, Australia, after a long battle with cancer.