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Kua Kia Soong
Published 5:30 pm
Modified 5:31 pm
COMMENT | How quickly Malaysians forget history.
The 2007 demonstration by mainly ethnic Indians organised by Hindraf was instrumental in effecting the tsunami in favour of the Pakatan Rakyat coalition during the 2008 General Election and which saw the downfall of BN in 2018.
How did that Hindraf rebellion happen if it had not been for the fact that Malaysian Indians were, and still are, among the most marginalised and oppressed minorities in the country?
Today, the old leaders of Hindraf are silent on the Black Lives Matter movement that has erupted all over the world. After all, they were the ones who handed in a memorandum on “Police Shootings and Deaths in Custody” to the authorities on 4 March 2004. Alas, it looks as if the Hindraf leaders have been thoroughly turned over and co-opted by the ruling coalition, even seduced by a ministerial post.
Middle-class Indians may want to claim otherwise but obviously, it is the mainly the working-class ethnic Indians who bear the brunt of this racial discrimination. Most of the time, it is the poor and marginalised Indians and not the well-feathered Indian lawyers, doctors, engineers and businessmen who bear the brunt of police brutality. A local NGO, Edict, has even gone to the extent of saying:
“There is no compelling data to support statements that the Malaysian police systematically target Indians. The truth is, police misconduct is race-blind in Malaysia. In Malaysia, the response to George Floyd’s death should be a response to police brutality, not a response to (alleged) discrimination against Indians.
In furthering this assertion, Edict claims Suaram’s statistics on deaths in custody in Malaysia in our Human Rights Reports are flawed. My colleague in charge of documentation and monitoring will respond to these allegations in time.
Is racism against ethnic Indians imagined?
In recent years, a pattern has emerged in which ethnic Indians, who number less than 10 percent of the total population, find themselves the disproportionate majority in official statistics on deaths in police custody and victims of police shootings.
This reflects the racist portrayal of the marginalised Indian community in our state institutions. Through the years, we have also witnessed many cases of racial slurs against ethnic Indians in the mainstream media and even in school textbooks. There have also been complaints of anti-Indian racism in tertiary level institutions.
Racism against ethnic Indians also exists in mainly Malay-dominated residential schools:
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https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/529643
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