Kapiti mayor bowing out
Two-term Kapiti Mayor K Gurunathan will not be standing for the mayoralty again.
‘‘I just got my first grandchild . . . it’s changed my perspective quite a lot.’’ Ka¯ piti Coast mayor K Gurunathan
After two terms as Ka¯ piti Coast mayor, K Gurunathan is not standing in October.
His announcement comes as he revealed to Stuff a lifetime fighting – and experiencing – racial injustice, and the skinlightening lengths he had to go to in order to win the mayoral chains.
He tells the story about how tough it was to get a decent photograph on his driver’s licence. Gurunathan always looked like a tiny ‘‘black blob’’ to any police officer on a routine traffic stop.
He could not take the risk of his billboards looking like his licence, he says.
‘‘And then, when you’re looking at one vote, two votes, three votes’ difference, there’s the supplemental campaign you’ve got to think of. Do I scare them?’’
So he lightened his skin on his billboards. ‘‘I had to tone my blackness down. How do you handle that one?’’
It was not about wanting to be white, he says, but toning down his blackness to get to the other side.
The other side in Ka piti is a set of chains that until Gurunathan arrived were only ever worn by Pa keha .
He worked for much of his adult life as a journalist, back in Malaysia, and in Aotearoa, particularly in the Kapiti community, where he gained the profile that won him a council seat.
After two terms as a councillor, and two as mayor, Gurunathan says he plans to hang out with his first grandchild, who is 10 months old, and write.
‘‘I will be 70 this year, and I just got my first grandchild ... it’s changed my perspective quite a lot.’’
Becoming the first minority mayor of Ka¯ piti has come at a cost for Gurunathan. He said lightening the tone of his skin on billboards for his winning campaign was a ‘‘blow’’ he had taken to push through to success.
Gurunathan arrived in Aotearoa from Malaysia as a student in the mid-1970s ‘‘with $200 in my pocket’’.
On his father’s side, his family had been indentured labourers from India, working in Malaysian rubber plantations.
His father had used a primary school-level education to escape that life, and eloped with his Sri Lankan mother to the Malay Peninsula.
This, Gurunathan said, was where his family’s rebellious streak had originated.
Growing up, he experienced racism and the negative stereotypes of plantation workers, he said.
After arriving in Aotearoa, he joined Nga Tamatoa, a renowned group of young Ma ori activists, and attended the landmark human rights events of the next decade.
This included the Bastion Point occupation in 1978, and the 1981 Springbok Tour, where he donned home-made body armour and was beaten by police.
‘‘When I was in Nga Tamatoa, I saw and heard the parents who were beaten in school for speaking Maori. I saw the ... police oppression, the use of police at Bastion Point, at Raglan, to protect the status quo.’’
After working as a journalist, Gurunathan spent two terms as a councillor before winning the Ka piti Coast mayoralty in 2016.
He said racial justice in Aotearoa was both getting better and also going backwards. References to the Treaty of Waitangi had been more firmly enshrined in legislation, he said, but the progress itself created a backlash.
‘‘Things are changing quite a lot, but we have a saying in Malaysia – ‘‘Nyawa-ikan’’. Nyawa-ikan is when you take the fish out of water, and it takes the last gasps, and that can be frenetic. So it’s got worse from that group of people who are in the old school.’’