Road cleared for Hindraf-Pakatan talks

The news that a breach has opened up between the Hindraf leadership and their strident legal advisor P Uthayakumar should ease the way towards a meeting to seek common ground between the Hindu rights movement and Pakatan Rakyat.

With a general election imminent, both sides should waste no time to effect an accommodation.

Anyone of objective disposition would readily acknowledge what the Hindraf-organised demonstration of Nov 25, 2007, did to Malaysian politics.

It galvanised the opposition to Umno-BN and directly led to the denial of its customary two-thirds majority to the ruling coalition at the March 2008 general election.

Since that historic high, Hindraf has waned as a pressure group for the Indian poor, its dramatic rise followed by a precipitate waning.

This has come about through internal division, hubristic presumption about the righteousness of its cause, and a disinclination to see their plan of uplift for the Indian poor as integral to Pakatan's scheme for the advancement of the Malaysian poor.

While Hindraf felt that Pakatan was not adequately grateful for what the pressure group had done for them electorally in the 2008 election, the latter felt that Hindraf was far too ethnocentric for its taste.

Hubris, jealousy, recrimination and a host of lesser negatives clouded the path towards a working arrangement between Hindraf and Pakatan in preparation for the next general election.

To be sure, such an accommodation was always going to be difficult for Pakatan to work out in the face of the paroxysms of rage that periodically issue from Uthayakumar (left), Hindraf's stormy petrel.

Also, his tendency to denigrate Indian Malaysian leaders in PKR and DAP as "mandores" diminished the prospects of finding common ground between Hindraf and Pakatan.

Leaders among PKR and DAP, and even Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM), concerned about the plight of the Indian poor, waited in vain for the volcano of Uthayakumar's rage to abate before they could see a chance to work out some arrangement by which to advance the cause of the Indian poor, though they are disinclined to see the problem through the prism of race, as Hindraf does.

Major differences remain

Now, with Hindraf itself coming out with a statement that seeks to put Uthayakumar on notice that he does not speak for the organisation, the way has opened towards an understanding between the Hindu rights group and Pakatan in preparation for the general election.

The content and tone of the statement made by Hindraf national secretary P Ramesh (right) clearly disapproves of the puerile manner of Uthayakumar's challenge to the Pakatan leadership to state what they would do for the plight of the Indian poor in Malaysia upon taking over Putrajaya.

Finally, Hindraf has acknowledged that Uthayakumar is a polarising figure.

Pakatan should latch on to this admission by commencing talks with the pressure group towards an electoral understanding that would help garner for Pakatan the bulk of the Indian Malaysian vote.

True, even with the contentious Uthayakumar set aside by Hindraf, Pakatan has still to contend with Hindraf's vision of Indian uplift that the opposition coalition feels reeks of ethnocentrism.

Pakatan's vision is that their governance would let loose a tide in the country that would lift all boats, regardless of their ethnicity.

The more strident of Hindraf's activists would look upon this Pakatan vision as displaying the same cataracts that mar Prime Minister Najib Razak's vision for the Indian poor: the prescribing of placebos for a predicament that requires panaceas.

Hindraf is adamant that the issue of Indian poverty requires a race-specific prescription for its alleviation.

How to find equivalence between Hindraf's ethnocentric vision and Pakatan's non-sectarian approach towards the entire issue of combating poverty in Malaysia?

This is a tough call which can only be eased if both sides are amenable to a tacit acknowledgment of their basic positions, which on Hindraf's side is that Indian poverty is not amenable to merely incremental potions and on Pakatan's part, that the tide they will let loose would make the Malaysia poor buoyant.

Hindraf and Pakatan share an understanding of singular import: the deeper problems of our national polity are beyond BN's ability to tackle.

A Hindraf-Pakatan electoral understanding represents mature acknowledgment of this reality.

Absent such an understanding would be tantamount to consigning the poor to more time in the doghouse.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.