Malaysia's minority Indians
drift By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR - More then 150 years after
arriving here to work British-owned rubber
plantations, Malaysia's minority Indian community
is drifting aimlessly and with little to call
their own in their adopted land.
Once
again the plight of this minority community is
being hotly debated, and once again there is deep
division over what the causes are and what the
remedies might be.
The travel and tourism
lines of Malaysia, "Truly Asia", are just that -
intended to project the image of a contented,
plural society living in prosperity while the
reality is that there is simmering
resentment particularly
among Indians of Tamil origin.
After 150
years of laboring in rubber and oil-palm
plantations and in the Public Works Department,
building every kind of infra-structure, Malaysian
Indians own less then 2% of the national wealth,
economists told a public forum on the future of
Malaysian Indians last week.
Malaysian
Indians have yet to discover their inherent
talents, find adequate expression for their
culture or assert their identity despite forming
about 8% of the population of 25 million people -
the third largest group after native Malays who
form the majority and the immigrant Chinese.
In 2004, minority Indians accounted for a
disproportionate 15% of juvenile delinquents,
committed 40% of all violent crime and made up
nearly 50% of all convicts in prisons - presenting
the typical profile of a helpless underclass.
Malays constitute nearly 60% of the
population, while the economically dominant ethnic
Chinese, who control business, make up 25%. The
rest are mainly smaller indigenous groups.
"We arrived here with a few cooking pots
and pans, and three or four generations later most
of us are still no better off," said A V Kathiah,
a former trade unionist. "Some Indians don't even
have that - they have become beggars. "We are
marginalized and forgotten not just by the state
but also by our own Indian leaders. We have no say
on how policies are formulated and our future is
really bleak."
These arguments are
familiar and have been heard, argued and written
about for many decades.
Despite the
grievances, some Indians have done well and have
on their own footing clambered up the education
ladder out of poverty and today count as
successful doctors, engineers and accountants -
even businesspeople.
But experts say the
majority of the Malaysian Indians are trapped in a
life of quiet desperation.
Last week, the
government's top economic planner gave a briefing
to 500 Indian intellectuals, arguing how the
government takes the future of Indians into
consideration when formulating policies. He asked
for a show of hands of people who are happy with
the measures taken by the government. "Not one of
us raised our hands," said a university lecturer
who attended the briefing.
Mustapha
Mohamad, who heads the government's Economic
Planning Unit, then asked who was not satisfied.
"All of us put our hands up," the lecturer told
IPS. "We told him in no uncertain terms that
government has done little or nothing."
The problem, however, is not just official
neglect, experts say. While the Malay-dominated
government openly favors native Malays and
actively helps them get a head start in every way
possible way - scholarships, business loans,
employment, industrial training - the same
government has refused minority Indian demands for
an affirmative action policy that would give them
a helping hand.
"We're not asking for
handouts," said Denison Jayasooria, executive
director of the Social Strategic Foundation, a
private think tank for ethnic Indian concerns.
"There are government policies in place to
help Indians, but implementation has been weak,"
Jayasooria said recently. "If this is not
addressed, there will be a lot of discontent."
Government authorities should recruit more
Indians in the civil sector, ensure more places
for them in public universities and increase
business loans for Indians, he said.
Outside an affirmative policy, the
government has helped through a quota system under
which Indians get 5% to 10% of university places,
scholarships and some minimal employment in the
civil service. A small elite within the community
has used these resources to climb out of poverty,
but for most there are no such doors to escape.
Some experts also blame the deep division
within the community along caste, class and ethnic
lines. These are historical factors created by
British colonialism that artificially created a
structured Indian community with better off,
upper-caste Malayalees (from Kerala) and Jaffna
Tamils at the top and lower-caste Tamils, who form
about 80% of the community, at the bottom.
While the Malayalees and Jaffna Tamils
benefited from the close proximity to the British
masters and exploited the modernizing economy to
accumulate wealth and advance economically, the
Tamil laboring masses remained trapped in rubber
plantations, living a miserable existence enclosed
by a green jungle impenetrable to any modern
influence.
Also, like the Chinese who
maintained or built new networks on the mainland,
the Malayalees and Jaffna Tamils had networks to
fall back on in their native lands and had options
to move back or move on to other climes.
In contrast, the Tamil laborers had turned
their backs on the villages in India they came
from, and the ignorance and apathy born out of
poverty in the plantations resulted in many of
them not getting citizenship even in Malaysia.
This prevented them from getting jobs or accessing
benefits.
The plantation Tamils suffered a
major blow when rubber and oil-palm plantations
were converted to golf courses, housing and new
township as the country experienced an economic
boom in the 1990s.
Many Tamils were
uprooted and ended up as unskilled workers living
in urban slums, an ideal breeding ground for
crime, drugs and gangsterism.
"But those
who move to urban centers sometimes have it worse,
finding themselves in squalid, crime-ridden
settlements and working as low-paid laborers
because they lacked sufficient education and
skills," said the social activist, S Arulchelvam.
The arrival of several million foreign
workers made Tamil labor irrelevant to the
economy, further marginalizing the community and
pushing some of its youths to a life of crime.
Unlike other Indian ethnic groups, the
Tamils could not fully exploit education as an
escape tool. Tamil schools were neglected not only
by the state but also by the community itself.
Until lately education did not figure highly in
the Tamil laborer's scheme of things.
The
Tamil-dominated Malaysian Indian Congress party
(MIC) did try various schemes to give the Tamil
masses a stake in the economy - from forming
cooperatives to setting up a solely Indian-owned
corporation. These schemes failed not just because
of bad management but also due to pilfering by the
very people entrusted with the hard-earned cash.
The MIC political leadership and vision is
also stagnant, feudal and lacking in clout.
Although a partner in government, the MIC, led by
Samy Vellu since 1979, has not been able to
pressure the government into improving the
fortunes of the Tamil masses.
"He [Samy
Vellu] runs the party like a feudal
zamindar [tax collector] and makes all the
decisions and hangs on to power and will probably
die in office," said an academic.
Being a
minority, the Indians lack the numerical strength
to either exert any political influence or make a
significant contribution to the national economy.
The plight of the Tamil masses stems first
from their own apathy and by the effects of
systematic exploitation by colonial capital and,
now, neglect by independent Malaysia.
Despite dozens of seminars and scores of
learned papers, neither the community's leaders
nor the MIC have come up with a systemic plan that
the government might use to help the Tamil masses,
leaving them rudderless and adrift.
The
neglect has given rise to a strong undercurrent of
dissatisfaction and anger in the community - an
anger that calls for urgent attention.
