Anusha Arumugam, September 18, 2013.

It is naïve to think that the Ops Cantas Khas, initiated on 17 August 2013 would be the solution to Malaysia’s increasing incidents of crime and growing number of gangsters.  This pernicious situation cannot be superficially addressed via police aggression and the incarceration of gangsters from the now exposed 49 secret societies, numbering to some 40, 000  individuals.

The media has quoted Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, Home Minister Zaid Hamidi and Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar to have acknowledged the operation’s progress of detaining over  2, 000 suspects as of satisfactory standards and to have vowed to keep the operation continuous and relentless. Meanwhile, interviews conducted by local dailies indicate that the general public seems pacified with these turn of events. These notions are understandable but misplaced.

Prima facie, crimes may be temporarily reduced but the roots of this deeply embedded dilemma would remain unaddressed, should more in-depth measures linked to public polices remain unchanged. The causes of such crimes are fundamentally attributed to poverty and widening inequality.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, in his article “Poverty, Evil and Crime” states that poverty makes a person outraged and desperate, instilling a sense of injustice within himself.. This then forms a good ground for rebellion – even bloody rebellion. Thus it is not out of the ordinary to find that in most organized crimes, the poor and oppressed are drawn in and harvested for the purposes of the commission of crimes.

For over 40 years Malaysia has aggressively engaged itself in numerous poverty eradication programmes through the implementation of the New Economic Policies (NEP). The NEP’s objective was to eradicate poverty irrespective of race and to execute economic restructuring with the aim of eliminating ethnic identification on the basis of economic inequalities.

However, these conscious and concerted efforts were made primarily to address the plight of the Malays and the Bumiputeras while the other races were neglected. The NEP’s policies were politically used and abused for the dominance of Malay political power. It had then transcended into becoming a tool for the Malays and Bumiputeras for an easy access to education, wealth distribution, employment, housing and social safety net.

This skewed and unabated implementation culminated in the distortion of social structures and desisting it became impossible.. Consequently, this caused the structural marginalization of the Indian poor in the mainstream development of the nation as a whole.

Borrowing a point from S. Nagarajan’s research paper entitled “The Case of Low Income Malaysian Indians”, it is stated that studies in developed countries have shown a link between crime and inequality and indicated that groups or gangs engaged in unlawful activities are more likely to form in situations where the chances of achieving success legitimately are small in circumstances of affluence.

Fast developing Malaysia is getting into the above trap. This is mirrored in the Home Ministry’s current statistics which disclosed that the majority of the gangsters are Indians (28, 926), followed by Chinese (8, 214), Malays (1, 923), Sarawakians ( 921) and Sabahans (329). The Indians are exceptionally over represented and this should come as no surprise, considering the following findings as reported by S. Nagarajan:

a.) The Indians have the lowest life expectancy and comprise the largest group of suicide victims recorded annually nationwide. There were 21.1 suicides per 100,000 Indians, 8.6 per 100,000 Chinese and 2.6 per 100,000 Malays. In 2005, of the 703 suspected criminals held at the Simpang Renggam Rehabilitation Centre under Emergency Ordinance, 377 or 54 per cent were Indians.

b.) More than 30 per cent of Indians do not own a house compared to the national average of 25.2 per cent for Malays and 17.6 per cent for Chinese. Indians collectively own only 1.3 per cent of equity in listed companies; this figure has remained stagnant for years.

c.) In 1966, out of the 202,250 Indians employed, 137,150 (68%) of them were plantation workers and 48,850 (24%) were occupying the lower rung of the civil service, mainly as menial workers in the railways and government. The Indian labour which peaked to 163,577 in rubber plantations in the year 1979 declined to 13,366 in May 2004.

d.) Consequently, from the year 1980 to 2000 an estimated 300,000 Indian plantation labour were displaced from the plantations due to crop conversion from rubber to palm oil and due to the real estate property development of plantation land.

The government is well aware of these data and its obvious failure to address these Indian predicaments amount to nothing less than outright indifference, be it intentional or otherwise. What more, the ethnic representation in the government is too deplorable to demand effective and radical corrective measures for the Indians.  At this juncture, the implementation of a need-based policy frame work is critical to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. However, it is unfortunate that the government is once again shooting itself in the foot by bolstering the Bumiputera agenda via the recent proposal announcements as featured in the dailies. This wedge is politically driven to further divide and polarize the populace on ethnic lines.

For an alarmingly disproportionate number of criminals to originate from the ethnic Indian community, one cannot but trace this to the government-induced ‘structural marginalization’ that impoverishes and oppresses the Indian poor. Thus, in attempting to salvage this deteriorating quandary, the government is in dire need of political will to restructure the ethnic based government policies instead of spending much resource on security measures and the building of prisons.