No sooner had Sirkunavelu Jayathas - a key man in Hindraf and the Human Rights Party prior to enlisting earlier this week with PKR - joined the latter party than he has hit the deck running by integrating his activism on behalf of Indian Malaysians under its aegis.
Today he led a delegation of PKR members, including vice-president N Surendran, to lodge a police report against the intended demolition of a century-old Hindu shrine in Jalan P Ramlee in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur City Hall has given a month’s notice to the temple authorities of intent to demolish. The PKR delegation is attempting to head off the demolition.
The speed and ease with which Jayathas (left) has found his stride within PKR serves to underscore a point that sympathisers of Hindraf have tried in vain to impress upon the movement’s founding duo - the brothers P Uthayakumar and Waythamoorthy.
This is that their vision of a quasi-separatist channel - one that entails the fulfillment of specific quotas in enumerated fields - for the advancement of Indian Malaysian aspirations is not just unfeasible; it is self-defeating.
The decision of Jayathas, who was Hindraf’s information chief and key mobiliser from the movement’s inception five years ago, to join PKR is an implicit repudiation of this vision.
His choice of PKR, the most multiracial component of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat, as the political vehicle for the integration of the aspirations of Indian Malaysians within that party’s overall aim of an egalitarian Malaysia is realistic.
Botched meeting
A reflection of the dead-end the quasi-separatist vision of Hindraf’s founding duo portends could be inferred from the outcome of a meeting its chairperson, Waythamoorthy, requested with Pakatan supremo Anwar Ibrahim and BN chairman Najib Razak.
Waythamoorhy (right), sensing, perhaps, that the movement was losing relevance in the face of the momentum propelling the Pakatan-led movement for political change in Malaysia, with a general election looming, recently returned from exile in London to press the Hindraf agenda.
After it became clear that police were not going to harass him, Waythamoorthy got down to business: he demanded a meeting with the point men of the competing political coalitions, no less.
PKR, implicitly acting on behalf of Pakatan, signaled that they were prepared to engage with the Hindraf leader, widely viewed as the less strident and more amenable of the brothers who founded the Hindu rights movement.
The party send to the proposed meeting a high-level delegation that included secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution, Selangor Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim, vice-president Tian Chua, and Subang MP S Sivarasa, who before Surendran’s emergence as vice-president was the party’s principal interlocutor for Indian Malaysian aspirations.
In the event, the meeting was fruitless because N Ganesan, the person sent by Hindraf to the encounter, insisted that Waythamoorthy would only meet with Anwar and no one else. Given such presumption, the meeting turned out to be futile.
Fortunately, both sides refrained from engaging in recrimination.
Shortly after the botched meeting which took place some two weeks back, Jayathas signaled to PKR that he wanted to enlist with them in his stated goal of helping to eject BN from power at the 13th general election.
To him, the primacy of that goal overrode other considerations and PKR seemed the most suitable political channel by which to effect it.
Stateless Malaysians
This year alone PKR has stolen an impressive march over other political parties competing for the Indian vote by espousing the cause of stateless Malaysians, the bulk of whom are Indians.
Led by Surendran (left), the party has spearheaded a campaign to obtain citizenship for these stateless Malaysians, many of whom have been resident in the country for decades.
The campaign has issued in a declaration by PKR supremo Anwar that if Pakatan wins the general election, a register of the stateless would be maintained and the process of legitimising them as citizens would be expedited.
Not to be outdone, the DAP will shortly announce that the Penang state government in which they are dominant would commission five officers to scour both the state and nation to ferret the stateless, register them and facilitate the process of legitimising them as citizens.
Thus an issue that has been on the backburner for decades, to the dire detriment of countless numbers of Indians conservatively estimated as running into six figures, is on the road to a resolution certain to be radically better than the status quo.
It is one more proof that the sociopolitical advancement of Indian Malaysians is better achieved through it being subsumed under the Pakatan vision of overall uplift for the poor and marginalised in Malaysia, irrespective of race and religion.
In Penang, furthermore, the exertions of Deputy Chief Minister II P Ramasamy to raise the Indian presence in the employment and small business sectors is beginning to make real progress.
This is besides progressively higher allocations, year on year since the Pakatan government came to power in 2008 for Tamil schools, including easier access to scholarships by outstanding students.
In sum, collectively and separately, the Pakatan component parties are doing the cause of the sociopolitical advancement of Indians a power of good.
Today he led a delegation of PKR members, including vice-president N Surendran, to lodge a police report against the intended demolition of a century-old Hindu shrine in Jalan P Ramlee in Kuala Lumpur.Kuala Lumpur City Hall has given a month’s notice to the temple authorities of intent to demolish. The PKR delegation is attempting to head off the demolition.
The speed and ease with which Jayathas (left) has found his stride within PKR serves to underscore a point that sympathisers of Hindraf have tried in vain to impress upon the movement’s founding duo - the brothers P Uthayakumar and Waythamoorthy.
This is that their vision of a quasi-separatist channel - one that entails the fulfillment of specific quotas in enumerated fields - for the advancement of Indian Malaysian aspirations is not just unfeasible; it is self-defeating.
The decision of Jayathas, who was Hindraf’s information chief and key mobiliser from the movement’s inception five years ago, to join PKR is an implicit repudiation of this vision.
His choice of PKR, the most multiracial component of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat, as the political vehicle for the integration of the aspirations of Indian Malaysians within that party’s overall aim of an egalitarian Malaysia is realistic.
Botched meeting
A reflection of the dead-end the quasi-separatist vision of Hindraf’s founding duo portends could be inferred from the outcome of a meeting its chairperson, Waythamoorthy, requested with Pakatan supremo Anwar Ibrahim and BN chairman Najib Razak.
Waythamoorhy (right), sensing, perhaps, that the movement was losing relevance in the face of the momentum propelling the Pakatan-led movement for political change in Malaysia, with a general election looming, recently returned from exile in London to press the Hindraf agenda.After it became clear that police were not going to harass him, Waythamoorthy got down to business: he demanded a meeting with the point men of the competing political coalitions, no less.
PKR, implicitly acting on behalf of Pakatan, signaled that they were prepared to engage with the Hindraf leader, widely viewed as the less strident and more amenable of the brothers who founded the Hindu rights movement.
The party send to the proposed meeting a high-level delegation that included secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution, Selangor Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim, vice-president Tian Chua, and Subang MP S Sivarasa, who before Surendran’s emergence as vice-president was the party’s principal interlocutor for Indian Malaysian aspirations.
In the event, the meeting was fruitless because N Ganesan, the person sent by Hindraf to the encounter, insisted that Waythamoorthy would only meet with Anwar and no one else. Given such presumption, the meeting turned out to be futile.
Fortunately, both sides refrained from engaging in recrimination.
Shortly after the botched meeting which took place some two weeks back, Jayathas signaled to PKR that he wanted to enlist with them in his stated goal of helping to eject BN from power at the 13th general election.
To him, the primacy of that goal overrode other considerations and PKR seemed the most suitable political channel by which to effect it.
Stateless Malaysians
This year alone PKR has stolen an impressive march over other political parties competing for the Indian vote by espousing the cause of stateless Malaysians, the bulk of whom are Indians.
Led by Surendran (left), the party has spearheaded a campaign to obtain citizenship for these stateless Malaysians, many of whom have been resident in the country for decades.The campaign has issued in a declaration by PKR supremo Anwar that if Pakatan wins the general election, a register of the stateless would be maintained and the process of legitimising them as citizens would be expedited.
Not to be outdone, the DAP will shortly announce that the Penang state government in which they are dominant would commission five officers to scour both the state and nation to ferret the stateless, register them and facilitate the process of legitimising them as citizens.
Thus an issue that has been on the backburner for decades, to the dire detriment of countless numbers of Indians conservatively estimated as running into six figures, is on the road to a resolution certain to be radically better than the status quo.
It is one more proof that the sociopolitical advancement of Indian Malaysians is better achieved through it being subsumed under the Pakatan vision of overall uplift for the poor and marginalised in Malaysia, irrespective of race and religion.
In Penang, furthermore, the exertions of Deputy Chief Minister II P Ramasamy to raise the Indian presence in the employment and small business sectors is beginning to make real progress.This is besides progressively higher allocations, year on year since the Pakatan government came to power in 2008 for Tamil schools, including easier access to scholarships by outstanding students.
In sum, collectively and separately, the Pakatan component parties are doing the cause of the sociopolitical advancement of Indians a power of good.
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.
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