Little by little, the Indians are being pushed out

When the police, the political parties and the courts all gang up against you when your rights are being taken away systematically from you, what do you do? When politicians regardless of their hue or colour resort to manipulation and threats to carry out the usurpation of your rights, what do you do?

When the supposedly opposition parties opportunistically work with the same police and courts that they themselves are having trouble with, attack and prevent the poor and marginalised from realising their rights what do you do?

What do you do? What does one do? I think the inevitable is about to happen, if it is not already happening. Read on.

One must first have a basic understanding of how it all works in that we have this repeating outcome. The political system in the country is an electoral democracy. The social system is one based on ethnicity. The economic system is based on free market operation.

Put all this together and you have an ethnically-orientated policy-making government that favours the rich among the economic classes, the Malays among the ethnic groups and the politically-numerous groups, vote-wise, among the polity.

Within this system, when you have an ethnically homogeneous group that is numerically small and is at the bottom of the economic ladder (like the poor Indians) what tends to occur in this system is a systematic usurpation of its their rights and a denial of their share of the resources of this nation – in short, marginalization occurs as a direct outcome of the workings of this system.

The latest case is that of the Kuala Ketil Tamilar Association – a small association of Indians in the Kuala Ketil area, in Kedah. Right now, their burial ground is being threatened by the Kedah state government. This is a burial ground the Indians in that area have been using for a long, long time. Only a historical study can verify its true age, not petty politicians as they are wont to do in their eagerness to sweep away this part of our history.

Now using threats, using treachery, using the police, using the media, the Kedah state government is trying to steal this land from the Indians there, all over again. This story has been told so many times in recent memory across the country. ‘Economic development’ has been occurring on land - which was historically plantation land - for the benefit of the rich and the powerful in the country with little or no concern for the historical occupants of the land.

Little by little, the Indians are being pushed out – out of the estates, out of their temples, out of their urban squatter settlements, out of their traditional burial grounds, out of their schools, out of their traditional employment all without any or proper or equitable replacement. The aggregate social effect of all this is potentially a decimation of a community by what you can call a ‘death of a thousand cuts’.

When all this happens the people of the community are left with little choice but to look to their collective strength to stay this jeopardy to their existence as a community. They have to get organised to ward off this steady, sometimes open, sometimes surreptitious encroachment, which if not checked, means a complete erasure of their community from the face of this country.

That collective strength of these Indians is now finding increasing expression in Hindraf and the Human Rights Party. Hindraf and the Human Rights Party (HRP) are now increasingly providing the ideological, moral and physical leadership for the poor and marginalised Indians in Malaysia.

In the case of the Kuala Ketil Tamilar Association, they contacted HRP’s P Uthaykumar for support against those who were attempting to steal the burial ground off from them. Whether this initiative succeeds, the general process has begun - the process where the poor and marginalised Indians will start looking to Hindraf and the Human Rights Party for support against the systematic encroaching which they have been suffering silently all this while.

The poor and the marginalised need to be heard. They need to obtain their share of the resources of this country. They need to regain their lost dignity. They need to become equals in substance in this system. They need to stand up against the treachery that has kept them there.

mk
28/12/09