Imagine this scenario: “Hindraf wins suit against Her Majesty’s government ” screams the headlines of the Guardian newspaper in London on Sept 19, 2014. The judge had declared the day before at the High Court that there has been gross negligence on the part of the British Colonial government in the way they had failed to entrench the interest of the Indians in Malaysia as they departed as rulers of Malaya in 1957.
The case itself had been a grueling one with the full weight of the British establishment thrown against the claims by an unbending and resolute Hindraf. When the case began, it was viewed as no more than a frivolous claim within British legal circles. Only as the case proceeded and facts began to emerge about the specific manner by which the British Colonial government had gone about devolving power to the local elite and how it had colluded with them to the utter detriment of the minority Indians did it become obvious that this was going to make a serious dent to the reputation of the British.
The arguments from Hindraf based on the facts had been very intense and deep about the inner motivations of the colluding colonial master and their successor Malay elite and how it served their mutual interest to keep the Indian poor exactly where they needed to be. The revelations had caused the moralising British government serious embarrassments already.
The counsels representing Hindraf had understood from the very beginning that there would be sufficient evidence about collusion against the Indian poor between the departing British government and the elite to whom the power was going to be handed over. It was all really very simple. The Indian poor were nothing more than tools for profit. The British had brought them in just for that. Now for the British to get out of Malaya gracefully and with their interests intact they needed to patch together a nation-state out of the jigsaw puzzle of ethnicity, of class and of geography.
They needed to keep every one happy, most of all the Malay elite to whom they were handing over effective power. The Constitution and the other instruments of government they were leaving behind had enough in them to do this job. Unfortunately for them, the deliberations had been recorded and had captured the collusion, sometimes subtle, sometimes gross. In fact the local elite had been goaded in ways that only an imperial power with100s of years of ruling through treachery and deceit could know. The congruence of interests had been cleverly woven into the Constitution and into the structure of the instruments of government. The trajectory was set.
The counsels on the British government side argued that the British government could not be held liable. So much more had happened in the 50 some years since, so how can they be singled out in that jungle. Besides there are so many situations around the world of this type that it would be a hornet’s nest now, to apportion blame to a long gone colonialist government. This would have been an acceptable argument except for the fact that the outcome of deprivation and marginalisation could have been easily predicted and it would have been incumbent on any departing competent colonial government to set in place structures and processes to avoid the inevitable future adverse outcome.
The parliamentary democracy system works on numbers and money. It would not have taken much to see just where the Indian poor stood in this system. It was not as if this was not known – there were so many documented inputs to the British Administrators to that effect just in that period. All that did not matter. That would have disrupted the smooth transition the Britishers were planning. They did not want to ruffle the Malay elite’s feathers.
The British had much at stake in Malaya. The overall system of governance designed and left behind by the British even at its nascent stage made it possible for the Malay elite to disobey the social contract, with impunity. The strongest being always in the right, the only thing that mattered was to become the strongest. This the Malay elite quickly did. Disobedience becomes legitimate. Parliamentary democracy was all very convenient. This trajectory could be traced back to its origins in the collusion.
You have the net effect today on the Indian marginalised, the disobedience with impunity of the Malay elite to the provisions in the Constitution, the post colonial development of the various instruments of government, the gaping ambiguities and omissions in the Constitution and the collusion that occurred at the very beginning, which is so well documented and there you have the case for Hindraf.
Was the outcome therefore any surprise? Will such an outcome be any surprise?
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