HINDRAF PRESS STATEMENT : Sand and pebble eating poor and hungry Indian Children “Imprisoned”.

PRESS STATEMENT
Sand and pebble eating poor and hungry Indian Children “Imprisoned”.
Absurd and immoral action by Welfare Department.

It is absurd and ludicrous that the government has decided to place those children who were recently highlighted for eating sand and pebbles due to their poverty in welfare home.
The social welfare department of Malaysia established in 1946 has gone through many transformation but in essence its role towards children taken into their care are those who have been abused, discriminated, exploited and orphaned.

Although the government is a party to The Convention On The Rights Of The Child (CRC) 1994 & Bali Consensus On Partnerships With And For Children In The East Asia And Pacific Region (2005), they seem to have breached their consensus whereby rather than keeping the family together, they rather separate the family unity in the pretext for their political agenda.
The state of the children that was highlighted was not because the parents neglected them but due to poverty that is inbred in thousands of Malaysian Indian families for systematically discriminate practice even from the welfare department.

The Welfare Department similar to other organs of the UMNO led government seems to do as they like without regards to the welfare of the children or the family unity. Instead of helping these families who suffer in poverty they abjectly decide arbitrarily to deprive the children of their parents without a single thought for family unity. Isn’t it not the duty of the welfare department to utilise the hundreds of millions of ringgit allocated to its department to help those categorised as hardcore poor? In the case of this family the father earns a mere RM 400 per month and the mother is a housewife. What is preventing the Welfare Department from immediately giving them financial welfare aid to resolve the immediate problems and then work out a formula to place this family under the welfare program of its department?

The plight and cry of the children taken forcefully to stay with their parents "We love our mummy and … please let us go "

The welfare Department has de facto imprisoned these poor and helpless children for eating sand out of hunger. This is not the way to tackle the problem.

There seems to be no moral justification in taking the children into welfare care, when there are other options and avenues to maintain the unity of the family by other social programs that are mandated by law to provide for families such as this that face abject poverty rather than dividing the family unity.

Why the government resorts to such methods really baffles HINDRAF when it seems to only involve the Malaysian Indians. Is it because there is nobody to question them or do they have a hidden agenda to ensure that the Malaysian Indians remain as the new under classed society of Malaysia?

What is widely reported by HINDRAF /HRP on the plight of this family is only the tip of the iceberg. There is close to 500,000 Indian born generation displaced population from the plantation engineered by Dr Mahathir when he came into the picture in the 80’s who continues to face such predicament in silence.

HINDRAF cannot sit quietly and absorb such outright practice by neither the UMNO government nor the silence of the opposition political parties for fear of their political agenda against the voiceless Malaysian Indians who suffer in silence.

Thank you.

P.Waytha Moorthy
CHAIRMAN
HINDRAF.