Facts that the Indians are marginalised in Malaysia!

Helen Ang | Nov 20, 08 12:48pm

This article is written by Helen Ang in Malaysiakini and I have add my thoughts to the article. THe BN government led by UMNO is consciously hidding the truth! Read more.

Some weeks ago on Nov 4, the New Straits Times carried the headline ‘Zaid lucky to be born a Malay, says Syed Hamid’. Former law minister Zaid Ibrahim had said in his LawAsia 2008 conference speech on Oct 31: "The obsession with the Ketuanan Melayu doctrine has in fact destroyed something precious in us.

"It makes us lose our sense of balance and fairness."

The statement unsurprisingly caused Umno warlords to go berserk.

On Tuesday, Malaysiakini had the article titled: ‘Ramasamy unfazed by police report’. Umno Youth wants to sic its attack dogs on Penang second Deputy Chief Minister P Ramasamy for revealing glaring under-representation of non-Malays in government service.

Anyone who walks into the state administrative building of Komtar can see for himself the truth of Ramasamy’s words that even in Penang where the population is half Chinese, the civil service is overwhelmingly Malays.

Lets look at some facts from the Seberang Perai Municipal Council website its list of office holders as below:

Datuk Mohd Aris Ariffin (MPSP municipal president), Fauziah Ariffin (Aris's special asst), Zainol Abidin Md Noh (municipal sec), Siti Aishah Kassim (SUP's special asst), Noraziah Abdul Aziz (director, admin & HR), Mohd Ibrahim Mohd Nor (asst director, HR), Norhayati Sulaiman (asst director, R & D), Latifah Razali (asst director, acquisition & supply), Siti Haslinda Hasan (asst director, training & quality), Maskiah Abdullah (counter officer), Asma Othman (auditor), Lee Moong Nah (director, IT), Hassan Hashim (info systems officer), Abdul Fikri Ridzauudin Abdullah (info systems officer), Mansor Hashim (legal director), Rosnada Abu Hassan (asst director, legal), Munir Affan (asst director, enforcement & security), Mohd Hairay Mohd Yusof (finance director), Shahrulnizad Abdul Razak (finance asst director), Ummi Kalthum Shuib (finance asst director), Dr Romli Awang (health & urban services director), Fadzilah Hasan (director, licensing), Mohd Faidzal Hassan (asst director, licensing), Kamaruddin Che Lah (engineering director), Khirul Annuar Shamsudin (asst engineering director), Baderul Amin Abd Hamid (asst engineering director), Rosnani Mahmud (asst engineering director), Mohd Syukri Said (asst engineering director), Mohd Sobri Che Hassan (asst engineering director), Muhamad Kamaruddin (asst engineering director), Md Pilus Md Noor (building director), Abdul Rahman Harun (asst building director), Ahmad Fuad Hashim (town planning director), Norliza Abdullah (asst town planning director), Mohd Ridzal Abdul (asst town planning director), Kamariah Ramli (asst town planning director), Azian Ahmad (asst town planning director), Dahalan Fazil (asst town planning director), Rozali Mohamud (valuation director), Mat Nasir Hassan (asst valuation director), Ahmad Syahrir Jaafar (asst valuation director), Wan Junaidy Yahaya (community director).

What do the names above tell you? Yet there are those who complain that the fate of Malays in Penang is like disenfranchised Palestinians languishing in their homeland.

Umno claims Malays are dispossessed.

The truth is Umno tortures statistics. Numbers are ‘turned over’ to confess a story protecting the party’s interest. When the statistics show another side, Umno bullies.

It threatens, it appeals to the police and uses media, it compels the numbers to retreat from public view, for example when then Deputy Finance Minister Dr Awang Adek Hussin told Parliament in November 2006 that bumiputera shares equity ownership in Bursa M’sia was 36.6 percent but the figure was retracted six days later.

Threat to national security?

Late last year before the authorities detained the Hindraf five under ISA, it spun statistics to portray the Indian community as successful and therefore, ingrates to be thus whining.

Not too long ago, prior to the Home Ministry banning Hindraf, they did the same again, and our mainstream media were complicit in aiding and abetting the government to demonise the movement.

Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar deliberately skewed his reading of the figures to dismiss how on the whole, Indians are indeed a marginalised community.Jayanath Appudurai passed Helen a copy of his monograph Malaysian Indians: Looking Forward, co-written in 2008 with G.A. David Dass which analyses more data.

I thin the official statistics available in the public domain is incomplete. While the surveys and studies are adequate, their findings are not released transparently.

As corroborated by the figures Ramasamy cited, the top tier of civil servants in any government department comprises a cabal belonging to one particular race solely.

Jayanath spents about half a year on research, piecing together peripheral statistics to complete the picture by looking from side angles. It is a sad portrait our authorities-in-denial refuse to paint in full.

Name-calling Chinese and Indians ‘pendatang’ conveys the impression that the minorities have only just stepped off a slow boat from China and India.

The Tamil labour migration in fact began in 1786 with the establishment of the crown colony of Penang. They were brought in to work the plantations and build the infrastructure. At Independence in 1957, Indians were 11.3 percent of the population. In 2005, they were 7.5 percent. By 2020, it is forecast they will constitute less than 6.5 percent.

In 1957, about 70 percent of the Indian labour force was in the plantation and mining sectors.

In 1970, 46.5 percent were in agriculture. In 2000, only 11.1 percent remained in agriculture while 62 percent were in the manufacturing and services sectors.

A Canada-published research by N.J. Colletta called the plantation Indian labour force ‘Malaysia’s forgotten people’. When the estates were fragmented, its workers were forced to relocate to urban dwellings, such as the squatter area of Kampung Medan.

"There is a perception that the majority of Malaysian Indians are mired in a proletarian urban under-class," writes Jayanath.

"Undeniably there has been a fundamental shift of the Malaysian Indians labour from primarily tapping rubber in the estates to soldering chips in the factories, sweeping drains, cleaning toilets, supervising car parks and driving lorries in urban areas," he observes.

I’ve a personal anecdote from my schooldays to relate. A prefect – an Indian boy from my cohort – could not get a place in local public university and went on to supervise his dad’s car park. My ex-schoolmate could well have been one of the statistics.

Coming out of the woodwork

Zaid is lucky to be born a Malay, said Syed Hamid. I say Malaysia has done Indians a great disservice by begrudging its acknowledgment that they have worked hard and contributed much to building this country.

Malaysia is compounding this disservice by not uplifting its poor Indian citizens according to need; this due to affirmative action programmes being race-biased.

At present, we’re in the 9th Malaysia Plan phase 2006-2010. The NEP started in 1970 resulting from May 13, 1969.

The New Economic Policy morphed into the National Development Policy (NDP) which is associated with the Second Outline Perspective Plan or OPP (1991–2000). NDP got new clothes as NVP or National Vision Policy coinciding with the Third Outline Perspective Plan (2001–2010) or the Emperor’s ‘Vision 2020’.

The general trend during the 8MP period was that the rich got richer and the poor poorer.

Malaysia fares among the region’s worst along the Gini coefficient indicator with great inequality in income between the top and bottom earners.

9MP makes no specific mention on addressing Indian poverty, which was calculated at 3.5 percent in 1999.

By 2004, the number of impoverished Indian households had increased to 13,300, up 600 from five years prior. Jayanath concluded that by the government’s own definition of poverty, Indians have become progressively poorer.

Annual growth rate of Indians is lagging behind Bumiputera and Chinese. Before NEP, Indians as a whole – there are so many Indian doctors and lawyers, says Syed Hamid – were earning a little more than the national mean, but after four decades of NEP and in the noughties, the gap closed and Indians earned less.

OPP stats say the income disparity ratio between total Malaysian and Indians was 1:1.15 in 1970, and 1:1.06 in 2004.

Since we’re toggling with numbers, please note our government was insisting that Bumiputera equity had remained fossilised at the magic-sakti percentage of 18.9 percent. The purported under-achieving bumiputera share of the economic pie seems to have shrunk with the passing years ... if Umno is to be believed.

It is only now with Pakatan Rakyat in power in five states that the hitherto obscured data is slowly beginning to come out into the open.

And it took a deputy chief minister from the federal Opposition, no less, and he a former professor who had done research first-hand to shine some light into the dark corners.

Official data has long been hidden because it not agreeable to Umno for us to know.

This is why I repeatedly mentioned in my blog that Malaysia need change for the sake of Malay survival in this competitive world!