A Petition to Seri Paduka Baginda Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah By HINDRAF MAKKAL SAKTHI To Uphold The Rights and Legitimate Interests of the Indian Community in Malaysia.
Your Royal Highness, We at HINDRAF are very happy that Your Royal Highness is now our 14th Yang DiPertuan Agong. This happiness derives from the fact that we are all Your Royal Highness ’s subjects and also from Your Royal Highness ’s proclamation at the Installation on the 7th of December 2011 that “The Agong is the umbrella over the people and the people are the pillars of the Agong. The Agong’s greatest role is to ensure there will be no cruelty, and destruction, to the people and to the country. In a constitutional monarchy system, the Agong is the arbitrator, the balancing power so that there will be peace, stability and public order.” We are extremely happy to hear our Monarch make such a balanced and morally significant proclamation.
In this context we would like to bring to Your Royal Highness’s attention an issue pertaining to the marginalized Indian community in Malaysia and seek Your Royal Highness’s intervention to redress a problem that is a direct result of the application of morally wrong principles of governance by the UMNO led Government. This has had the deleterious effect of marginalizing large sections of the Indian community through the erosion of their rights and freedom.
As Your Royal Highness is aware, the bulk of the Indians were brought into Malaya from the 1790s as indentured labour by the British. The Indians thus brought over have worked the land for the then British Rulers and subsequently for the Malay Rulers. The Indians had been promised by various British Residents who advised the then Malay Rulers of the States that the migrant Indian labourers be given land to settle in Malaya upon completion of their labour tenures. The decisions of the British Residents were made with the express involvement and approval of the then Malaya Rulers as it was thought that such a policy would motivate the continuing migration of Indian labour to
produce the wealth that lay nascent at the time.
The Indians labourers contributed to the production of significant wealth in the cocoa, spices, sugar, coffee, rubber and palm oil plantations, in the building of railways, roads, in education, medicine, law and various other departments of the Governments. In these roles they contributed significantly to developing and integrating Malaya into the modern economy of the world throughout the late 1800s and through the 1900s. Your Royal Highness may be aware that in 1957 at the inception of the nation, the industry of the Indians contributed almost 70% of the Malayan
Government’s revenues- in the form of receipts from rubber.
However after the completion of their indenture periods the Indians were not settled with land as had been promised. They just stayed on scraping a living using only their wits. What surfaced this serious historical deception was the significant decline in rubber prices in the 1970s. This resulted in the conversion of significant tracts of rubber plantation land to oil palm cultivation and to other commercial, industrial and residential developments and the mass push out from the estates of the Indian labourer communities. There are estimates of up to eight hundred thousands who were evicted in this manner. The fact that they were all landless under these circumstances affected much
of the subsequent history.
What should have occurred to have facilitated this massive migration did not occur. Had they been given the land as was promised the situation today would have been quite different. No alternative job training opportunities were provided for the forced urban migrants. There was no compensation given whatsoever to tide over the transition, no alternative housing was provided to these landless labourers and no alternative land as discussed above was provided to settle on, like the Felda scheme.
These people were left stranded and dispossessed. There were no policies or programs facilitated by the government to protect their welfare and their rights, regardless of their significant contributions to the economy. What happened alongside was a decimation of a whole rural social system of the Indian poor. The Tamil schools, the Hindu temples, the Hindu burial grounds, the few social amenities were all now taken away by default from these workers who moved from rural communities into urban slums in the fringes of the urban centres. An underclass community began
to emerge. This problem was ignored and the Indian poor community has been deliberately left to their very meagre resources to fend for themselves, by the UMNO led government for more than 40
years now.
Large part of the national development budget was channelled through scores of agencies such FELDA, FELCRA, RISDA etc., in respect of the various development programs for the rural and agricultural poor. All of those programs and projects only benefited the majority Malay community without any allocation of funds in any of these programs and projects for the displaced Indians ,who indeed were a large part of rural Malaya/Malaysia and who would have contributed in more productive ways had they been given the opportunity.
The New Economic Policy which was implemented from 1970 and its successive economic programs have ignored the needs of the Indian community and we lay this blame squarely on the UMNO led racially motivated Government , which implemented various race based programs in the name of the NEP.
All of this has resulted in abysmal socio-economic performance of the Indian community. The Malaysian Indians have the highest suicide rate, highest number of Malaysians killed in police custody as a consequence of the unofficial shoot to kill policy, highest rates for involvement in crime. There are an estimated 300,000 stateless Malaysian Indians. They are the spill over from the displaced plantation worker problem. This statelessness leads to larger issue like inability to pursue education, seek jobs, obtain driving license, get legally married and own property. The Indian poor community is a community in distress and is in a trap that it cannot extricate itself from without adequate State intervention . The UMNO led Government with their racial paradigm has not shown the will to solve the problem at its root, rather the symptoms are swept away from view . This has caused the problem to swell. How can this ever be morally justified – a government turning its back on its own people.
There have at best been miniscule allocations for development programs targeted at the Indians specifically, and with no correlation to the magnitude or the gravity of the need. There are less than 2% Indians employed in the various arms of the Government (even then, mostly in the low ranking jobs), less than 2% in public universities and tertiary public educational institutions. Not only are all these unfair in relative performance, but also in absolute performance – all because of the racial preoccupation of the UMNO led government. This is a far cry from the situation at independence. The rot has been caused by the post-independence policies of the UMNO led government.
We at HINDRAF, are not against policies and programs to uplift the Malay community. We are happy to see the national wealth seep down in society. Our main concern, however is that the upliftment programs of the government are racially unbalanced and is based on a morally wrong precept of race or ethnicity. We believe the Government should be the Government for all the people, regardless of ethnicity – which they have shown through their allocation of the national wealth to be not.
Various attempts in approaching the government to resolve these serious and pressing issues concerning the Malaysian Indians has resulted in very little progress. It appears that there is no political will amongst the ruling UMNO to resolving these issue in a fair and just manner.
We at HINDRAF ask for nothing more than to return the legitimate rights of the marginalized Indian poor as Your Royal Highness’s subjects , to be allowed to live a life of dignity and to live a life of hope and of equal opportunity to participate more fully in the building of our nation. With social engineering of the NEP large section of our population, the Malays, have progressed significantly. We are happy for them. But it is time for the UMNO led Government to recognize the serious imbalance in their racially slanted policies and to institute appropriate corrective measures to
redress the imbalance and to do the same for the Indians. But they have shown no inclination whatsoever to make the needed policy changes to redress the problem of the marginalized Indians. Your Royal Highness, we think it is time for some wise intervention. We seek Your Royal Highness’s intervention to set matters right. We have a situation where a process which is morally wrong underlies the policies of the current Government. The race based and racially slanted policies of the UMNO led Government has resulted in the development of Institutionalized racism in the country.
Racism is morally wrong and we believe that only the supreme wisdom of Your Royal Highness can help to eradicate such a morally wrong paradigm of governance.
It is expressly stated in Article 153(1) that “It shall be the responsibility of the Yang DiPertuan Agong (YDPA) to safeguard the special position of the Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak and the legitimate interest of other communities.
The purpose of Article 153 is that it confers reasonable powers on the government under the purview of Your Royal Highness to act as a check to prevent the abuse by the present government to oppress, suppress and marginalize its people and its citizenry on the basis of human rights as it fails to address the legitimate interest of other communities as protected under Article 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 of the Federal constitution.
The grievances of the Indian community is longstanding and needs redressing urgently. The ruling government is not serious about addressing these problems. We have steadfastly been pointing this out to the UMNO led Government and for that they have unconstitutionally declared our movement illegal.
HINDRAF’s clearly stated objectives are:
1) To bring the Indian poor into the mainstream of national development
2) To eliminate all racist and religious supremacist state sponsored policies .
We believe these are more than morally sanctioned objectives. Also all our approaches are well within the confines of what is guaranteed in the Malaysian Federal Constitution and laws. We as your subjects , now present this petition to Your Royal Highness and humbly request the following:
1) To advise the current Government to give us HINDRAF MAKKAL SAKTHI formal recognition to represent the Indian marginalized and poor as provided for in the Federal Constitution.
2) To provide us with an audience, so that we can provide Your Royal Highness with documented facts and to provide evidence of Human rights abuses and gross negligence of the ruling government in addressing the woes of the Indians in Malaysia in relation to their legitimate rights as a citizen of Malaysia in adherence with the Federal constitution. They have denied the Indian community in the country their fundamental rights of equality. And it is a historical truth that there can be no dignity where there is no equality – not for any of the subjects of Your Royal Highness, not
ever.
We come to Your Royal Highness because we believe Your Royal Highness’s reign has potential to bring about the needed change based on Your Royal Highness’s proclamations. We thank Your Royal Highness in anticipation.
Daulat Tuanku !
Signed on Behalf of all the Marginalized Indians in Malaysia
Sambulingam
National Coordinator
