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Thursday, February 12, 2015

WHO CAN SAVE THE MALAYSIAN INDIANS?




By Lim Teck Ghee,
Heat Online
Among the recent news has been the leadership crisis in MIC and how its leaders have turned to the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to help prevent the party from being deregistered and engaging in fratricidal warfare. I use the word “fratricidal” regretfully. It is a word which is used to describe the killing of one’s brother or sister and sometimes, less commonly, to the accidental killing of one’s ally.

Some observers will feel that both meanings will apply to the current situation in the party which has been the principal flag bearer for the Indian community in the Alliance and Barisan Nasional over the past 60 years. Other less charitable observers think that the current exchange of fire between the two rival groups is purposefully, not accidentally, directed at each other; hence there is every intention of killing off or incapacitating the other side.

A foreigner who is not acquainted with the country will probably see the news item as indicative of the bizarre and grubby nature of Malaysia’s politics. An Indian party turns to Umno leaders to save the skins of its leaders when in fact many members of the community see Umno-driven policies as being a major reason for the socio-economic problems of the minority community!

But, in fact, this political surrealism is not a new pattern. It merely reflects the reality of Indian development in Malaysia, a pattern well described in a new book on Indians and their past and recent history. The book is a must read for all Malaysians interested in knowing the truth about the country’s development and how the Indian community has helped shape it, and in turn been reshaped, for better and worse by forces external as well as originating from the community.

According to the author, Dr Carl Vadivella Belle (pic), a scholar who was an ex-diplomat based in Malaysia in the 1970s, Indians have become increasingly politically and economically impotent as a minority group in a nation dominated politically by colonially (and I may add post-colonially) derived narratives of “race” and ethnicity and now, by the imperatives of a born-again Islam.

What inspired Belle to write the book, Tragic Orphans: Indians in Malaysia, is useful to reproduce. In his introduction, he notes:
“I uncovered a truly shocking passage contained within the 1957 Federation of Malaya Census Report. Noting that four million Indians had been recruited to work in colonial Malaya and that 2.8 million had subsequently returned to India, the Report commented: “Much of the 1.2 million net immigration appears to have been wiped out by disease, snakebite, exhaustion and malnutrition, for the Indian population of Malaya numbered only 858,614 of which 62.1%was locally born.” The bland, matter-of-fact language cannot begin to disguise the tragedy and horror which lurks behind these raw statistics. Nor does this brief summation of the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indians begin to evaluate the appalling human toll that was exacted in the development of a prosperous colonial economy that enriched many investors and contributed significantly to the wealth of Great Britain. There is no official monument to the nameless Indians who laid the economic and infrastructural foundation upon which the emerging modern Malaysian economy was constructed, but working class Indians will inform you that their legacy is to be found in the railway sleepers and rubber trees of Malaysia; each representing the sacrifice of an Indian life.”

This background explaining how the Indian community, exploited by the dominant colonial, and later post-colonial government, has stagnated at its underclass position is an important part of the historical injustices that young Malaysians have not learnt about. It is not only not studied; present day Malaysian leaders seem to have forgotten this recent past. Hence the new injustices which have been added on to the burden of being born an Indian in Malaysia.

Can Umno resuscitation save MIC? And can MIC save the Indians? Unfortunately, past history provides a bleak outlook. This is what the book has to say about the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW), the organisation established to ensure that the interests and rights of Indian plantation workers would not be sacrificed, and which has been so dominant in Indian lives.

The NUPW failures [in defending plantation workers’ rights] may be attributed to a number of factors. Perhaps the most obvious is that many leading officials have come to regard their positions as sinecures, appointments which are vital to accumulating power and establishing networks of patronage. By the early 1990s, many NUPW officials had occupied their positions for upwards of 40 years, and had never once been subject to any serious challenge. It might reasonably be anticipated that uninterrupted tenure would breed both complacency and staleness, and indeed informants suggested that the upper echelons of the NUPW are unresponsive to grass roots concerns, and enjoy over-familiar and cosy relationships with government officials.

Anyone who thinks Indian interests can be advanced by the current cast of Bollywood-type characters should read the book.

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