The time has come for the Indians to wake up to the fact that the representation under Pakatan is much better than under BN.
With
the battle for votes about to go into full swing now, it looks like the
Indian votes will be the deciding factor in Peninsular Malaysia as both
the Malays and the Chinese seem to have made up their minds.
This being the case, it is best for Pakatan Rakyat to name an Indian
candidate to contest one of the seats in the Federal Territory of Kuala
Lumpur.
DAP should take the lead in this matter and name lawyer M Manogaran,
the current MP for Teluk Intan, Perak, to contest in Seputeh which is
currently held by Teresa Kok, who also holds the state seat of Kinrara
and is a senior member of the Selangor state executive council.
In line with DAP stalwart and chairman, Karpal Singh’s exhortation of
“one person one seat” with the exception of Penang Chief Minister Lim
Guan Eng, it is best that DAP’s Iron Lady focus only on her state seat.
Alternatively, another current Kuala Lumpur DAP MP could be moved to
Seputeh and Manogaran takes over the contest for the former’s seat.
Among the three Pakatan component parties, DAP has the most number of
Indians as lawmakers. In fact, the Indian representation under Pakatan
is greater than under MIC.
It was DAP which chose V Sivakumar, the Tronoh state assemblyman, as the Perak State Legislative Assembly Speaker.
When Barisan Nasional grabbed power undemocratically in Perak, it was
forced to name R Ganesan as Speaker. This was done in order to follow
DAP’s precedent of allocating the seat to an Indian and thus the Indian
representation was maintained so as not to cause anger among the
Indians.
Fairer representation
Talks are ongoing for an Indian DAP MP to contest in Kuala Lumpur and
this will truly enable the Indians to obtain a fairer representation in
line with Pakatan’s policy of giving fair representation to all races.
Indian issues are a contentious point as the Indians have been sidelined for as long as anyone can remember.
The Pakatan state governments are trying to assist them in various
ways such as awarding to them contracts under open tender, whereby
Indians who possess the expertise have made a successful bid, for
example, the grasscutting project in Selayang.
Inevitably, it takes time to assist as many Indians as possible and
Pakatan has been the Selangor state government for only a little more
than four years compared to BN, which has been helming the state for 51
years from 1957 to Mrach 2008.
Under Pakatan, more Indian voices are heard in Parliament and in the
State Legislative Assemblies and things can only get better for the
Indians if Pakatan were to win the polls at the federal level.
The time has come for the Indians to wake up to the fact that the representation under Pakatan is much better than under BN.
In Penang, too, the Kampung Buah Pala issue was in the end resolved
amicably when the residents of Kampung Buah Pala were given good homes
(costing more than RM500,000) by the developer.
A thorny issue or rather two sticky issues for the Indians are schools and citizenship.
DAP MP for Ipoh Barat, M Kulasegaran, and his colleague, Chong Eng,
the DAP MP for Bukit Mertajam, are both well-known advocates of the
schools issue and have been consistently bringing up this matter in
Parliament by urging the BN federal government to build more Tamil
schools.
As for the citizenship issue, only now it has received great media attention and action from the powers-that-be.
It is only close to a general election that the “identity
card-for-Indians” issue always comes up while at other times this issue
is lost in space.
Indian voice drowned out
Under the BN leadership when BN had the two-thirds majority in Parliament, Indian voices were on most occasions drowned out.
It was only after the Hindraf protest on Nov 25, 2007, that BN
leaders woke up to the grouses of the Indians. But even till today with
BN still helming the federal government, the plight of the Indians has
not improved much.
In May 2009, this columnist was walking home when two Indians on a
motorbike threatened her with a parang to surrender her handbag.
“One has to understand that the high number of Indians resorting to
crime compared to the ratio of their population is because many Indians
are jobless,” Kulasegaran said to this columnist.
This is indeed very sad statistics and it shows that Indians have
been sidelined for a long time and that many of them who have low
education must be jobless.
No one would simply risk committing a crime and getting into jail unless they are desperate and have nowhere to turn to.
Many factories which could have employed low-skilled Indians are now
employing foreign workers. Whose fault is this? One should not only
blame the employer but also the government for not curbing the intake of
low-skilled foreign labour whose jobs can in fact be done by our
Malaysian citizens.
Crime is due to joblessness and joblessness is due to something wrong
in the system. In fact, many of our local citizens from all races who
are of low education are now resorting to crime.
Back to the Indians, they must remember the treatment meted out to S
Ambiga (Bersih co-chairperson) after the Bersih event on April 28 before
putting in their all-important vote at the ballot box.
The Indians must vote wisely in this coming 13th general election.
Will the Indians vote for something much better to improve their future
opportunities and those of their children and their children’s children?
No comments:
Post a Comment