The case against the UK government is for
real. Win or lose, the Malaysian people will win with this case just for
coming to the fore.
N Ganesan
On July 2, 2012, Hindraf filed a civil action on behalf of the
marginalised Indian community in Malaysia against the UK Government in
the High Court of Wales and England calling into account the British
government for its role in the antecedents leading up to the severe
marginalisation of the Indian poor in Malaysia today.
The key questions that Hindraf seeks answers for in this civil action are:
1) If the British are solely responsible for the presence of most of
the Indian poor in Malaysia today, do they also not share responsibility
for what is happening to the Indian poor in Malaysia today? After all,
the Indians were brought into the country by them under their watch for
over 150 years. It is now just over 50 years since they left.
2) Knowing the British deftness and skills in running their Empire
can we accept that they did not recognise this possible turn of events
to an enfeebled community upon their departure? Or was it also a part of
their post-colonial imperial design to leave these people in this
enfeebled and exploited state to maintain ongoing divisions in the
colony?
3) Is what happened in 1957 so remote from what is happening in 2012
to render Hindraf’s case academic? Namibia is calling into account the
genocide of several hundred thousands of their people by the German
colonialists today, what happened in the early 1900s. Armenia is still
calling into account the Turks for the Turkish genocide of more than a
million of their people again in the early 1900s. The Jews are still
calling into account all those responsible for the Holocaust of the
1930s and 1940s. In this case, the aggrieved Malaysian Indians are
calling into account the devastating effects on several generations of
Indians that has left them without systemic protection as an enfeebled
minority.
4) The UK was instrumental in establishing the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1949 at the United Nations. Are we to take it that
such a declaration which is not even a legally binding one on nations
can be more circumspect in their statement of human rights than one
which defines a whole new nation. What they left Malaya with was an
entrenched two-tiered citizenship in perpetuity, defying relevance to
the most fundamental of these human rights principles. In the process
they created a politico-legal basis that has led to the development of
an institutionalised racist regime here in our country.
These are only the key issues and questions that will be raised.
There are other issues and questions that Hindraf seeks answer for as
well – and those will come out in the course of the case. Armed with
documentary evidence collated from archives around the world, it is now
making a claim in the British courts for declarations by the British
courts about the reneged role and responsibility of the colonial British
government to the Indian marginalised poor in the country that they and
only they, were responsible for creating in Malaysia.
Treacherous manipulations
When history came calling and the British had to pack up and leave
Malaya in 1957, how did they leave, after reaping huge profits on the
backs of the people of this country. Did they recognise their full
historical obligations to all the peoples of the country? A significant
portion of the Malayan population – their creation had been uprooted
from India and brought here to an alien land.
Did they recognise any obligations to these people? Did they not
anticipate or think about what would happen to this enfeebled community
after they left? As long as they were around, the Indian coolie was
still an asset to the Empire. The dynamics would certainly shift after
they left – were they not savvy enough to recognise this?
Yet even as the British colonialists left in 1957, they only cared
about their strategic and security interests in the region, so that
their wealth in Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo, Sarawak and Brunei
would be protected. They had just lost India, Burma and Sri Lanka. To
achieve this narrow end, they did what they always knew best – to
collude with the local elite of the day.
They left a politico-legal system that took only the convergence of
interests of the departing British and the new elite to whom they would
hand over power into consideration. They saw no reason to see any more.
They justified everything they did to achieve this with their typical
imperial manipulations.
But the processes of history cannot be substituted by these
treacherous manipulations. Surely we see the outcome today of that
manipulation, a steadily deteriorated institutionalised racist system – a
subtle, pervasive and increasingly aggressive racist system, that today
denies equal opportunities to a large section of the Malaysian people
and in its worst manifestation basic life opportunities to those at the
tail-end of the whip – the marginalised and poor Indians.
Hindraf is calling into question the role of the British colonial
government in creating a politico-legal system in Malaya upon their
departure, when they knew full well they had all the political and
military muscle they needed, to do otherwise. The British obsession of
the day was however only narrowly circumscribed around securing their
wealth after their departure.
They chose to play the ethnicity variable to this advantage – created
two-tiered citizenry in their usual ambiguous imperial style to please
an elite and to protect their interests post 1957. If you look at the
departure of the British throughout their former dominions, it is
striven with the results of this kind of imperial manipulations – large
ethnic, sectarian, religious and linguistic divisions persist in this
so-called British Commonwealth.
Three important factors
Three major historical processes and factors have to be clearly
understood in order that the responsibility of the British/Malaysian
Indian problem of today can be fully grasped. This is necessary to
understand why Hindraf is pursuing the matter in the British courts – so
far away and on a matter that took place a long time ago. Without
knowing these truths it will be easy to pass off Hindraf’s initiative as
mere political theatrics.
The first factor and the most significant factor was the growth of
capitalism in Great and Greater Britain, fuelled by the industrial
revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Significant accumulation of
capital and expansion of demand and consumption occurred during this
period even after the loss of their American British colonies in the
late 18th century.
The industrial revolution produced many significant innovations that
accelerated these developments. Great Britain produced the largest ships
of the time, produced the most lethal of guns, created increasingly
powerful machinery for industry, connected the British Empire with
telegraphic connectivity and produced a finance industry that both grew
on and fed these innovations while creating new enabling opportunities
for these developments. These together created the conditions necessary
for the acquisition of a large empire by a geographically small nation.
The demand for the raw produces of far eastern colonies of tin,
coffee, sugar, tea, pepper, spices and rubber increased substantially
with profits skyrocketing in this trade. The trade in these commodities
was originally carried out by the East India Company – a monopoly joint
stock company established in the 1600s which effectively governed slices
of the globe on behalf of the British Crown.
Only after the Indian Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 was the power formally
transferred to the Crown directly – to Queen Victoria and her
representative Governor-General as the head of the British’s possessions
in India. With the demise of the monopoly of the East India Company,
trade began to accelerate between the colonies and Great Britain. India
then became the centrepiece for the growth of the British Empire post
Americana. This is the second of the factors that must be understood.
India served as the bulwark for the Empire in providing a
multifaceted second base for the control and growth of the Empire. India
was the second administrative centre, a second military base; a second
base for labour after Africa was lost on the abolishment of slavery, a
second huge market for the expanding production at home. India besides
providing a steady feed of revenues to Great Britain effectively paid
for all these services to the burgeoning Empire all by herself – what a
deal!
The imperial need for profits found synergistic opportunities in
factors prevailing in the colonies – land, climate, labour and political
control. The British government created new policies in the colonies
facilitating British investments – one of the key ones was the labour
policy.
Shortage of labour
The abolition of slavery created a shortage of labour in the
colonies. The local labour force in most of the colonies resisted moving
out from their traditional vocations in large enough numbers to serve
the growing British appetite. Britain decided to emigrate a very large
amount of labourers from their second base in India initially to the
sugar producing colonies – Mauritius, Fiji Island, Caribbean islands of
Jamaica, British Guiana, and Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia, Natal in
South Africa, Ceylon, Burma and Malaya– most of these colonies having
neither strong local political and administrative organisations nor an
economic base beyond their rivers, coasts and fields and herds.
And very conveniently, British India successfully satisfied the needs
of the voracious British appetite for labour in the plantation
enterprises and for the infrastructure works needed to facilitate the
exploitation of the colonial opportunities.
The Indian “coolies” (indentured labourers) sent into Mauritius from
1834 came to be regarded as the most important early immigrants of this
type. In 1844, emigration was increased to include Jamaica, British
Guiana, and Trinidad. Emigration was legalised to Grenada in 1856 and
St. Lucia in 1858. In Natal, one of the early South African republics,
the system of indentured labour began in 1860.
Indentured labour migration to Malaya actually began in the 1830s but
only accelerated after 1874, when the British expanded their control to
the Federated Malay States of Perak, Selangor and Negri Sembilan. It
was after the effective takeover do we see an exponential rise in
investments from the UK and the migration of Indian coolies into Malaya.
This is the third factor to be understood – the creeping colonial
control of Malaya.
By 1913, British capital investments in Malaya amounted to 40 million
Straits Dollars, by 1923 it had risen to more than a 100 million. The
area under rubber cultivation grew rapidly from 20, 200 hectares in 1900
to 219,000 in 1919 and 1,320,000 hectares in 1938.
Correspondingly the population of Indian coolies brought in by the
British Colonial Administration and settled in Malaysia rose from
268,269 in 1911 and 470,180 in 1921 and 612,487 in 1931. By 1918,
exports of rubber from Malaya amounted to about 50% of the world’s total
rubber consumption.
What better explains the presence of a large impoverished population
of Indians in the country than this correlation between the needs of the
plantation enterprises in Malaya and the growth of the Indian coolie
workforce?
Two streams of migrants
However, it must be said that there were two streams of migrants that
came in from India. One was the indentured stream or assisted migration
which brought the workers in as coolies which accounted for the largest
portion. The other was the unassisted stream that came in, both driven
by the opportunities afforded by the presence of a large pool of Indian
labourers already in the country and by the need the British had in the
other sectors and services in the country. India again provided the base
for such labour to run the colonies. The British used to boast that
they ran their colonies with only a few thousand of their own kind.
Therefore what happened in Malaya was the Malayan play of the
imperative of the British Empire for profits. All entirely and only for
the profit of British enterprises. All other explanations proffered are
just to obscure this one fundamental historical fact to absolve the
empire of any ongoing responsibility. This was without any doubt a
British design.
In summary, Hindraf is really alluding to the basis of our nation
through this case. These are large issues of international significance,
of international law, of historical threads, of moral and historical
obligations and it surely takes a sweeping breadth of the mind to even
conceptualise this, let alone to take it to the courts. Only a weak mind
will pass this off as trivial. Hindraf is really doing a great service
to the nation.
Do we want a nation based on racist principles or do we all want a
nation that is truly free and truly democratic and just to all its
citizens regardless of skin colour or the customs at home. It is our
opinion that there is not enough political will across the political
spectrum today to address this question. Change cannot therefore be
expected to happen from within any time soon. The issue has to come to a
fore; Malaysia has to be seen to be what it is becoming, in the
international fora, as a racist state, if only for the interest of
Malaysia and Malaysians.
This change is sorely needed today, because institutionalised racism
is a socially sanctioned value in Malaysia. Unless there is a change in
this social value across the entire Malaysian polity where racism will
be seen as a scourge rather than as a protective mechanism against the
other, will there emerge a truly modern Malaysia.
The alternative scenario is a continuation of the status quo. We are
doomed to see a further deterioration of our performance as a nation if
status quo prevails for much longer. But the subjective conditions have
to align with this objective need. The social values have to first
change.
The articulation of the issues during the case will bring these
developing tendencies out in full view and we are hoping that this will
provide the impetus we all require to reopen the discourse for a more
robust basis for our nation on a bolder, more futuristic and a
substantially inclusive platform.
We hope these openings that Hindraf provides will catalyse this change.
This is Hindraf’s case in its essence – if you care to understand it
in its depth and with an open mind. We are human rights defenders of a
different order and we use the little resources we have the best we can,
for the interest of all Malaysians – myopia which is so abundant just
does not help this understanding.
This case against the UK government is for real. Win or lose in the
courts, the Malaysian people will win with this case just for coming to
the fore.
N Ganesan is Hindraf’s national advisor
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