Of Indians And Pendatang

It appears that this issue has resurfaced after all those years, thanks to a speech by the Human Resources Minister Kulasegaran as he was addressing the presence of Indians in Malaya for centuries.

Which is nothing new nor surprising, since the Nusantara region has been regarded as Greater India.

So it's a shame he has apologised, because he said nothing remotely offensive nor untrue.

The controversial part about South East Asia being an extension of South Asia (mainly India), if anything, is this bit (though Kula never alluded to it):

One of the major issues with Indianisation is the common debate whether or not Indianisation is the reason for the development in South East Asia. Many struggle to date and determine when colonisation in Southeast Asia occurred because of the structures and ruins found that were similar to those in India. Several books and anthropologists believe that India is seen as the superior culture that influenced a lot of Southeast Asian countries. However, throughout this time that many began to debate, other anthropologists suggested that Southeast Asia had indigenous civilisation and the idea of Indianisation was just seen as a 'national motivation'. These debates continued for some time, until the Pacific War, which led to legitimately ending the debates and reviewing Southeast Asia's response to Indianisation.

While it may officially be referred to as Indianisation, there is no doubt that there was significant Chinese influence over South East Asia as well. After all, the East Coast of Malaya has had kingdoms, which were no doubt named by the Chinese such as the Chih Tu and Pahang (or Pan-Huang) and Langkasuka (which was a big force in its own right back in 3CE).

It's just that people tend to underestimate the influence of Islamisation in Malaya -- due to Greater India:

Not only was the spark of Buddhism the driving force for Indianisation coming to an end, but Islamic control took over as well in the midst of the thirteenth century to trump the Hindu kingdoms. In the process of Islam coming to the traditional Hindu kingdoms, trade was heavily practised and the now Muslim Indians started becoming merchants all over Southeast Asia. Moreover, as trade became more saturated in the Southeast Asian regions wherein Indianisation once persisted, the regions had become more Muslim populated. This so-called Islamic control has spanned to many of the trading centres across the regions of Southeast Asia, including one of the most dominant centres, Malacca, and has therefore stressed a widespread rise of Islamisation.

It was possibly during this time that Hindus began to recognise the dominance of Islam and marginalise its adherents, though perhaps that is a more recent thing. It's ironic that India marginalises its Muslim community. Even more bizarre that Myanmar refuses to acknowledge the Rohingya who have lived in the fringes for centuries.

I've blogged extensively on the issue of being called "pendatang", and I am tired of it. Only in Malaysia does such a trivial issue take up such levels of public interest and even aggression.

Perhaps that's what makes people tick -- feeling superior to someone else and belittling them.

Not too long ago, an Indian mob attacked a bunch of Muslim men who were minding their own business, going about India on a road trip (something they are perfectly entitled to do). The vicious assault left one of the five men, Mohammed Azam, a UK-educated IT worker from India's tech hub in Hyderabad, dead, and at least two of the others badly beaten.

The reason for that mindless assault? The answer given was, "He looked like a terrorist."

I despair. One nation champions its Malay Muslimhood and another flaunts its Hindu privilege. Yet they are both of the same stock.

Indian Expats Blame Samy Vellu

From: Times Of India
Expats blame Samy Vellu for Malaysia row

NEW DELHI: It was a volcano waiting to erupt and the Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas meet, which closed here on Wednesday, came as a godsend for many Indian expatriates in Malaysia to vent their feelings on what had gone "terribly wrong" with them in the south-east Asian nation.

As the Malaysian government went into a denial overdrive, insisting it never even imagined freezing recruitment of workers from India, the expatriates squarely blamed works minister Samy Vellu, part of the government for almost three decades now, for the "serious plight" of Indians, who constitute a substantial minority there. The burst came as several delegates from Malaysia, despite "the fear of being hounded" back home if their "identities became known", went on to detail "what was really happening" there.

The minister, also in Delhi for the convention, met PM Manmohan Singh, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee. Vellu, the only Indian in the cabinet, had on Tuesday denied reports on recruitment freeze, and Malaysia's home minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad echoed his words on Wednesday.

"In the real sense, recruitment freeze is a non-issue. PIOs in Malaysia, down now to 8% of population, are being systematically persecuted and marginalized in several other ways. Vellu, who uses his Indian origin for cosmetic purposes, has actually supervised this discrimination over the years," a senior second-generation delegate told TOI . The government's main idea, he said, was to give priority to ethnic Malays and Bhumiputras, who constitute 60% of the population with special rights under the constitution, and the Indians were the most to suffer under the practice.

"Our economic rights are under serious threat. There is a clear design to establish the social supremacy of the ethnic majority, and the mismatch between the civil (common) and Shariat laws has come as a tool for the persecution of Indians. Islamisation is another way in which we are being marginalised," he said.

Another delegate said the discrimination began way back in 1969 when the country witnessed "race riots", adding that the "big change" in the recent past was that Indians had become more organised.

"That is why anti-government protests rocked Malaysia in November last year. Vellu has been part of the decision-making process in the government, and to maintain his monopoly, he did not let the strength of Indians in the cabinet rise to even two in the 1990s. The number of Chinese cabinet ministers went up to six from three," he said.

Vellu is the head of Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) that supports the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition. The delegates said under the present electoral and constitutional system, politicians enjoy absolute powers so much so that even the judiciary was accountable to the executive and free operation of the media was a distant dream.

"Naturally, electoral and political reforms were a big demand during the recent agitation, but activists of Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) were branded anti-nationals and there was a move to press charges of treason against them. We do not feel secure," the delegate explained.

The Indians' share in the national equity basket was steadily declining. "Malaysia has nearly 1.8 million Indians and only 40% of them constitute the middle or upper-middle classes. The rest is blue-collar labour force. If there is one Indian diaspora experiment that has really failed, it is Malaysia. Unfortunately, the world is being told a different story," another delegate said.

India's Role In Malaysia's Ethnic Crisis

There's quite a bit of history lessons in here that I never got from my textbooks when I was in school.

Bummer.

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OVERSEAS AND UNHAPPY - India needs to pay attention to the ethnic crisis in Malaysia

by Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
The Telegraph (Calcutta, India)

Malaysia’s simmering ethnic crisis is something for the ministry of overseas Indian affairs to ponder on. Presumably, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman was bestowed on S. Samy Vellu, president since 1979 of the Malaysian Indian Congress and public works minister in the ruling coalition, because India approves of his work as representative of more than two million ethnic Indians. Since the man and his constituency are inseparable, convulsions in the latter that question his leadership oblige India to reassess its attitude towards the diaspora.

Initially, screaming headlines about Hindus on the march suggested hordes of ash-smeared trident-brandishing sadhus with matted locks rampaging to overwhelm Muslim Malaysia. In reality, thousands of impoverished Tamils carrying crudely drawn pictures of Gandhi sought only to hand over a petition to the British high commission in Kuala Lumpur about their plight since their ancestors were imported as indentured labour 150 years ago. It so happened that the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), a new umbrella group of 30 organizations, mobilized Sunday’s protest when Tamils battled the riot police for six hours.

The confrontation was even farther removed in space than in time from Lee Kuan Yew’s claim in 1959, when Singapore was waiting to join Malaya, that India was to Malayan culture “what Greece and Rome are to Western culture”. Peninsular Malay was part first of the Srivijaya empire and then of Rajendra Chola’s overseas dominions. Even modern Islamic Malaysia borrows heavily from India. Terms like Bangsa Melayu (for the Malay nation) and bumiputera (Malay Muslims), the cherished determinant of political and economic privilege, expose Malaysia’s own unacknowledged linguistic bankruptcy.

Describing the Thirties excavations in Kedah, which confirmed that Bujang was a Srivijaya empire port — dating back to the 4th century — within easy sailing distance of India, Time magazine reported in 2000, “But an Indian Malaysian visiting the Bujang Valley might come away feeling demeaned rather than proud — and that would be no accident.” Anthony Spaeth, the writer, went on to say that “the official literature does its best to downplay, even denigrate, the Indian impact on the region”.

Ironically, the Indian minority’s further marginalization coincided with the long tenure (1981-2003) of the former prime minister, the ethnic Indian medical doctor, Mahathir Mohamad. He also took Malaysia further along the road to Islamization. A kind of competitive Islam was at play under him with the fundamentalist Parti Islam SeMalaysia demanding Sharia law and Mahathir’s subsequently disgraced lieutenant, Anwar Ibrahim, peddling what he called Islamic values without “Arabisation”.

Lee says Chinese Malaysians (25 per cent) who have maintained an uneasy peace since the vicious Malay-Chinese riots of 1969, are being marginalized. But they at least have someone to speak up for them. They are also able to salt away their savings in Singapore where they often send their children for education and employment. Lacking any of these fall-back advantages, the much poorer Indians suffered in silence until Sunday’s upsurge. They did not protest even when six Indians were murdered and 42 others injured in March 2001 without the authorities bothering to investigate the attacks.

Nearly 85 per cent of Indian Malaysians are Tamil, and about 60 per cent of them are descended from plantation workers. Official statistics say Indians own 1.2 per cent of traded equity (40 per cent is held by the Chinese) though they constitute eight per cent of the population. About 5 per cent of civil servants are said to be Indian while 77 per cent are Malay. An Indian who wants to start a business must not only engage a bumiputera partner but also fork out the latter’s 30 per cent share of equity. The licence-permit raj has run amok with government sanction needed even to collect garbage. Lowest in the education and income rankings, Indians lead the list of suicides, drug offenders and jailed criminals. All the telltale signs of an underclass. While the state gives preferential treatment to bumiputeras, the MIC has done little to help Indians rise above their initially low socio-economic base.

Religious devotion often being the last refuge of those with little else to call their own, Indians set great store by their temples, which are now the targets of government demolition squads. Many are technically illegal structures because the authorities will not clear registration applications. The last straw was the eve-of-Diwali destruction of a 36-year-old temple in Shah Alam town which is projected as an “Islamic City”. Insult was piled on injury when, having announced that he would not keep the customary post-Eid open house as a mute mark of protest, Vellu hastily backtracked as soon as the prime minister frowned at him.

Emotions have been simmering since 2005 when the mullahs seized the body of a 36-year-old Tamil Hindu soldier and mountaineer, M. Moorthy, and buried it over the protests of his Hindu wife, claiming Moorthy had converted to Islam. A Sharia court upheld the mullahs, and when the widow appealed, a civil judge ruled that Article 121(1A) of Malaysia’s constitution made the Sharia court’s verdict final. Civil courts had no jurisdiction. Such restrictions and, even more, the manner in which rules are implemented, make a mockery of the constitution’s Article 3(1) that “other religions may be practised in peace and harmony”.

Last Sunday’s petition was signed by 1,00,000 Indians. The fact that it was provoked by a supposed conversion and a temple destruction and was sponsored by Hindraf prompted P. Ramasamy, a local academic, to say, “The character of struggle has changed. It has taken on a Hindu form — Hinduism versus Islam.” But that is a simplification. The protesters who were beaten up, arrested and charged with sedition were Indians. They were labelled Hindu because Tamil or Malayali Muslims (like Mahathir) go to extraordinary lengths to deny their Indian ancestry and wangle their way into the petted and pampered bumiputera preserve. In Singapore, too, Indian Muslims who speak Tamil at home or sport Gujarati names drape the headscarf called tudung on their wives and insist they are Malay. Malaysia’s Sikhs also distance themselves from the Indian definition which has become a metaphor for backwardness.

Branding Sunday’s demonstration Hindu automatically singles out the minority as the adversary in a country whose leaders stress their Islamic identity. The implication of a religious motivation also distracts attention from the more serious economic discrimination that lies at the heart of minority discontent. Acknowledging that “unhappiness with their status in society was a real issue” for the protesters, even The New Straits Times, voice of the Malay establishment, commented editorially, “The marginalisation of the Indian community, the neglect of their concerns and the alienation of their youth must be urgently addressed.”

Some have suggested that the illusory prospect of fat damages from Hindraf’s $4 trillion lawsuit against the British government may have tempted demonstrators. But the lawyers who lead Hindraf must know that their plaint is only a symbolic gesture like my Australian aboriginal friend Paul Coe landing in England and taking possession of it as terra nullius (nobody’s land) because that is what the British did in Australia. The more serious message is, as The New Straits Times wrote, that secular grievances must be addressed. Though plantation workers have demonstrated earlier against employers, never before have they so powerfully proclaimed their dissatisfaction with the government. In doing so, under Hindraf colours, they have also signified a loss of confidence in Vellu and the MIC. The worm has turned. There is a danger now of the government hitting back hard.

All this concerns India, not because of M. Karunanidhi’s fulminations but because interest in overseas Indians must be even-handed. The diaspora does not begin and end with Silicon Valley millionaires. Nor should Vayalar Ravi’s only concern be V.S. Naipaul and Lakshmi Mittal whose pictures adorn his ministry’s website. Indians of another class are in much greater need of his attention.