The direct causes of economic marginalization - unequal rights and unequal opportunities in the name of NEP.
In the last two parts I have discussed the meaning of the term ‘Marginalization’, its various manifestations, gave a concrete example of this marginalization process in the life of Mariappan and discussed the basic historical events that led to it. In this part I am going to talk about the five different ways in which the direct causes of economic marginalization - unequal rights and unequal opportunities contribute to economic marginalization.
A quick recap of the term economic marginalization: - Economically marginalized is
to be denied opportunities for participating productively in the economic development of the nation, to have been pushed out of the mainstream of economic development.
As I start this part, you may want to watch this video first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdmnN2bniq0 about Kampung Manis, an Indian squatter settlement besides the Malayan Sugar Mill in Prai, Penang. A video shoot of a squatter settlement which attempts to capture and explain what we are trying to portray in this series of articles on marginalization.
Squatter homes that are on the verge of being demolished, squalid living conditions, low income lives, unattended health and medical problems leading in many cases to short lives, especially among men, abandoned by the system, deprived of all luxuries of life, living from day to day, unsure about the meaning of life, manipulated by politicians whose attention spans are no more than the article in the daily newspapers or till the day of the election. This is economic marginalization, whose story has been told so many times over, just told one more time in Kampung Manis.
However this marginalized state for the poor Indians was not a forgone historical outcome. If there had been appropriate support in the 1950s and 60s when the Indian plantation workers were first being pushed out from the estates, in the form of FELDA or FELCRA or other rural land development programs the results today would be very different . But nothing like that happened, as the problem of the Indian poor was not a national priority for the UMNO led Government then…or even now. What started then as a problem with low priority soon became institutionalized by the expanded racist policies of the UMNO regime into conscious and intended neglect. UMNO saw in it, a way for them to maintain their supremacist position vis-à-vis the Indians.
This was an Apartheid type of racist system as far as the Indian poor were concerned. The Chinese community had taken a path of tackling their own problems using their own economic strength. The Indians found themselves without economic strengths as a community to chart an independent course and without political strength as a community to avoid the unequal treatment that was forced on to them by the UMNO regime. The inequality that was forced on them largely came from the implementation of the NEP.
NEP, though started with the objective of reducing absolute poverty irrespective of race, turned out to be a program to promote and secure the interests of the emerging middle class Malays while reinforcing and aggravating the poverty of the Indians. After the early years of the NEP, as the early Malay insecurity of being overwhelmed by the Chinese faded, the NEP became an aggressive racist patronage based program to consolidate, grow and protect the interests of the increasing class of rich Malays. It was in the period beginning with the NEP that the policy of conscious neglect of the Indians came into full bloom.
During this period the rights of the Indians as citizens steadily eroded, in spite of the explicit guarantees in the Federal Constitution.
Article 153 of the Federal Constitution states:
153. (1) It shall be the responsibility of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong to safeguard the special position of the Malays and natives of any of the States of Sabah and Sarawak and the legitimate interests of other communities in accordance with the provisions of this Article.
What has happened is a wholesale usurpation of the resources of the country by UMNO without consideration for “the legitimate interests of the other communities”. And it occurred with impunity.
This usurpation whose direct results were economic marginalization manifested itself in 5 different and often overlapping ways.:
1) By outright denial of basic rights
2) By direct denial of entitlements
3) By indirect denial of entitlements
4) By minimum allocation of Government budgetary resources,
5) By total non- allocation of Government budgetary resources.
1) Denial of rights
i) Employment opportunities in Government and in Public Sector enterprises for the Indian poor have reduced to zero in the Government Sector. The Government used to be a large employer of the Indian poor. In 1966, out of the 202,250 Indians employed, 48,850 or 24.2 per cent were employed in the lower rung of the Government; today employment by the Government of Indians at this level is practically zero. This was an outright denial of their rights for equal employment opportunity in the Government by the very Government that was supposed to safeguard such rights. On top of the opportunities in the Government sector that was denied, opportunities were also denied in the large number ( see the table below) of Government owned companies.
Number of Government owned Companies 1960-1992
Industry 1960 1980 1992
Agriculture 4 83 146
Building & Construction 2 65 121
Extractive Industries 0 25 32
Finance 3 78 137
Manufacturing 5 212 315
Services 3 148 321
Transport 5 45 68
Others 0 0 9
Total 22 656 1,149
ii) Rights to higher wages in the plantation sector were denied by the UMNO government policy of allowing in large numbers of foreign workers who depressed the earnings of the Indian workers from the 1980s. This benefited the owners of the plantation but it set the Indian workers back. There are an estimated 2 million foreign workers in the country today.
To illustrate, Boustead Holdings Bhd, Genting Plantations Bhd, IOI Corp Bhd and Sime Darby Bhd. are the four largest Plantation companies in Malaysia. The major shareholder of Boustead Holdings Bhd is Lembaga Tabung Angkatan Tentera (LTAT) , Genting Bhd and LTAT are two biggest shareholders of Genting Plantations, IOI Corp Bhd ’s largest shareholder is one Tan sri Dato Lee Shin Cheng, Sime Darby’s major shareholders are ASB, PNB and a Yayasan Pelaburan Bumiputra. Together these companies made a total profit of 7 Billion Ringgits in the last 4 years 2005-2008.
The policy of allowing foreign workers benefited these elites but not the Indian workers, they were denied their rights for better wages and working conditions. UMNO had become the representative of the rich and the interest of the Indian poor mattered none at all.
iii) Rights to adequate resettlement compensation was denied as the workers not only lost their jobs in the estates, but, more importantly, housing, crèches, basic amenities, socio-cultural facilities and the estate community support structure. They also lost the plots of vegetable farming and cattle grazing land allotted to them by the plantation companies, which they had used to cultivate to supplement their household incomes. The retrenched plantation workers were only paid termination benefits as specified in the Employment (Termination and Layoff Benefits) Regulations 1980, i.e.20 days’ wages for every year of service. These regulations were originally passed to protect industrial workers when the companies that employed them went into receivership. It was not appropriate to use this law in the plantation sector because it did not take into account housing, other amenities provided and sources of secondary incomes to the estate workers as wage substitution. Secondly, the Government owned plantation companies were not making losses when they retrenched the workers. On the contrary, they made enormous profits when they converted plantation land for property development.
The examples I have given above are just the tip of the iceberg. The denial of rights became a very pervasive aspect of the lives of the Indian poor.
2) Direct denial of entitlements
i) A large number of Indian poor are without proper identity documents –birth certificates and or identity cards. This effectively means they cannot or did not attend schools, cannot get proper jobs, will have no EPF or SOCSO accounts, cannot get driving licences, cannot get licence or permits for petty trade, cannot open a bank account, cannot avail of the even measly benefits of the Government to name just a few of the more obvious loss of entitlements. In the estates the Indian workers worked in an informal context where birth certificates and ICs, among other documentation, were not emphasized. Once they were pushed out this became a serious requirement which they were not able to meet. The result is deprivation. Here is an example, not an altogether untypical one - Jeeva Santhrika gets about RM4 per day to feed 5 mouths in her family. Her husband is in jail (because of a poverty related crime). There is no water and electricity supply in her squatter house. Both she, her husband and all her children do not have birth certificates and of course as a result no identity documents. Which means they get none of the entitlements in the law. (although they may all be third, fourth and fifth generation Malaysiana). Jeeva Santhrika earns RM 10.00 per day, working in a second hand goods shop. She has to pay RM 3.00 for 10 pails of water from a neighbor and RM 3.00 to buy candles per day. Jeeva Santhrika has a balance of RM 4.00 per day to feed five mouths and also to feed herself. (The Star 18/12/09 page 51). In this way she and her husband have been robbed of their entitlements as citizens, let alone as human beings. I am not sure, but I would not be too much off the mark, if I said that, that was the reason her husband had resorted to whatever it was that landed him in prison.
ii) Primary schooling - 371 of the 523 Tamil primary schools are still only partially aided by the government. There is no funding at all for the infrastructure of the schools. This is a direct denial of the entitlement of these children as young citizens of the country. Primary education is foundation education and because of lack of proper resources this foundation is not done well and this results ultimately in loss of significant human potential in these children as they grow up. This directly contributes to their economic performance later in life. A total of 106 Tamil schools, mostly in the plantations, were identified in 2004 as in need of repairs. Many schools use containers for classrooms. Others are located in shoplots. All the 371 schools do not sit on land owned by them. Many of them are located in very hazardous sites. Several are under pressure to move out from the sites where they are located. The major recurring theme in this primary Tamil School system is struggle for basic requirements, not one searching for educational excellence or one attempting to create world class citizens.
iii) A large number of Indian poor have been denied even the miniscule amounts given out by the welfare departments . For those earning below RM 720.00 per month (poverty level) the government promises RM 400.00 per month as welfare help. (NST 29/3/09 page 23).. But in reality the welfare department that is largely manned by Malay officers turn away the eligible Indian poor for the smallest of reasons. We have so many reports of this. Here is one example of such a case. Widow Parameswary (47) a diabetic, lives with her five children in one congested room at the back of a garage. Their toilet is just a zinc enclosure without a door but a piece of cloth. Her daughter does not have a birth certificate. They cook next to a drain and the washroom. She does not get any Welfare aid or a government flat. (TN 6/1/09 page 14). The welfare program, meaningless as it is is meant for such poor people, but we repeatedly come across cases like Parameswary. The welfare system is a poorly funded and inflexible system. Decisions are made by the rule book. This is typically the case with the way the Malay welfare officers deal with non- Malay cases – they throw the rule book at you. Their welfare aid has become a joke, especially with the Indian poor.
3) Indirect Denial of Entitlements
i) Ignorance of entitlements. Because of the ignorance of the Indian poor of the ways of officialdom , their inability to communicate effectively with government officials, problems understanding the procedures and various requirements many of the poor Indians ousted from the estates were unable to get their birth certificates (BC)s and or ICs. They do not get any assistance from the Government officers in getting their BCs and ICs. Many have become demoralized and have given up applying for the identity documents – in effect, they have resigned themselves to a legal limbo that effectively prevents them from enjoying the privileges and benefits that is truly their entitlements. This ignorance became another useful and convenient avenue for UMNO to deny the Indian poor their entitlement. It is estimated that there could be as many as 100,000 Indians in this category of stateless people.
ii) Denial of participation in Government rural development programs. These programs never reached the poor Indians because the plantations, were classified as private business, and hence were outside the scope of the development program, very conveniently. All of these fine print are part of a grand scheme of exclusion.
The consequence was that plantation resident families, especially in the smaller estates, continued to live in squalid conditions without adequate water and electricity supply even though development funds were poured into rural areas during the NEP period. The plantation owners did not provide adequate living facilities and the UMNO government did not provide them either because they were living on private land.
iii) Complicity of the Administration in denying the entitlement in law by enforcing the law selectively – do not enforce where it involves Malay businesses and enforce more than necessary where it involves Indian interests. The plantation companies were required by law to provide basic amenities, which they often ignored. The Government Administration did not enforce the Workers’ Minimum Standards of Housing and Amenities Act 1990 that would have compelled plantation owners to provide the basic facilities to improve the quality of life of the resident plantation families. Then Director General of Labour, Tengku Omar Tengku Bot, justified the lack of enforcement of the law in the plantations by pointing out that the department has “to be sensitive to the employer’s feelings and limitations…. We are not dealing with criminals or criminal law… . we are enforcing social law here”(Sunday Star, July 28, 1991).
However with scrap metal traders, the approach by officialdom is quite different. Of the scrap metal traders in Malaysia, 85 % are Indians. According to the Malaysian Indian Metal Traders Association secretary General Mr.R.A. Param,( July 22 2008 The Star) the livelihood of the scrap metal traders has been getting more and more difficult. He says that they have to get approval from seven government departments – the Local Council, the Land Office, the Fire and Rescue department, the District Health Department, the Drainage and Irrigation department, Public Works Department and the Police. Does that not sound like the racist UMNO government is trying to make it real difficult for this trade and the traders. This is the systematic way the racist UMNO blocks even in those areas where the Indians have by some turn of events developed an advantage. Many of the traders operate without licences as a result and are harassed daily by the authorities. This is a surreptitious way of denying the Indian operators their entitlements.
See how the officialdom has been trained to exclude. Biro Tata Negara would have played no small part in allof this. The Malaysian Administration took on an appearance close to the completely white Adminitsration of South Africa during the height of Apartheid – all 500,000 of the SA administration. We often hear the Politicians saying the policies are Ok but the implementation was at fault – as if that exonerated the politicians. It was part of a big game to stealthily esxclude and to deny entitlements.
02/01/2010
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