The former Fiji prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, says no ethnic Indian should hope to be prime minister of the country.
Mr Rabuka has told the Fiji SUN newspaper, Fiji's Indians should learn from Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born woman who became leader of India's Congress Party after the assassination of her husband, Rajiv Gandhi.
Mr Rabuka says when Congress won the election in India last year, Sonia Gandhi gave the top job to one of her deputies.
This is despite her wearing Indian clothes, speaking the Hindi language and assimilating into the Indian character.
Mr Rabuka says Indian leaders in Fiji should follow her example as none of them has assimilated the Fijian character in the way Mrs Gandhi had done with the Indian character.
But the Fiji Labour Party has condemned the statement saying its leader, Mahendra Chaudhry, is ready to become prime minister again.
A Labour coalition government of which Mr Chaudhry was a key figure was overthrown in Mr Rabuka's 1987 military coups and another, in which he was prime minister, was taken hostage at gunpoint in the May 2000 Speight coup.
It was Mr Rabuka who brought in the 1997 Constitution which removed racial restrictions from top jobs which had been imposed by the post-coup 1990 Constitution.
