Indians should hitch their wagon to Pakatan

I may be wrong but I think this country was built on the premise of Malay political primacy. I think this premise is embedded in the founding documents of this country.

Interpretation of this premise need not translate into repression of the rights of the non-Malays and minorities. It merely meant that Malays, being the majority race, are first among equals in this country.

It presupposed that Malay political leadership would carry through the ‘primus inter pares' (first among equals) premise in such a manner that non-Malays would not feel resentful and would support Malay leadership.

So long as these assumptions were not disproved, the Alliance and later its successor, BN, held sway in Malaysia.

Things were going reasonably well until Dr Mahathir Mohamad (right) came along. He committed a grave mistake: He transmuted benign Malay political primacy into suffocating Malay dominance.

Damaging consequences ensued.

The Malay consensus upon which Umno's political dominance was erected fragmented, with PKR and PAS the beneficiaries.

Also, Malay political dominance resulted in extreme marginalisation of the minorities, especially of Indians and the KadazanDusunMurut of Sabah and Dayaks of Sarawak.

At the 12th general election of March 2008, the disaffected among the Malaysian electorate voted in sufficiently large numbers to deny BN its customary two-thirds majority.

The myth of BN's invincibility was broken.

The events that immediately preceded and contributed to this destruction were Mahathir's appalling mistreatment of Anwar Ibrahim, widespread Malay revulsion at this abject spectacle, mounting disaffection of the population against BN's corruption and incompetence, and, finally, the withdrawal of Indian electoral support for the BN prompted by the Hindraf-organised march of the Indian poor in the country's capital on Nov 25, 2007.

Free ourselves from race-identity politics 

There were several beneficial effects from the unprecedented denial to BN of its two-thirds majority.

The corrupt began to know that their charade would not go unchallenged; the incompetent started to perceive that their pretense was up; a BN-compliant judiciary began to flex its independence; a BN-subservient mainstream media began to suffer acute loss of credibility; and ordinary Malaysians began to sense that the Gordian knots of race and religion have begun to loosen.

All these were beneficent ripples emanating from that historic event - the denial of a two-thirds majority to corrupt and complacent BN in March 2008, an occurrence to which Hindraf was a major, though not singular, contributor.

Now, five years after that seminal denial, Hindraf says the Hindu rights movement is owed big time by opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat that groups the three main beneficiaries - PKR, DAP and PAS - of the 308 tsunami.

It is calling in its IOUs in a way that would reinforce the race-identity politics from have helped to bring BN much grief and from which the ruling coalition seems unable to free itself.

No, I'm not claiming that Pakatan has entirely freed itself from this scourge but it is, at least PKR, and to a certain extent DAP, is on the path towards emancipation from that yoke.

By taking a needs-based more than a race-based approach to the challenge of tackling poverty among the Malaysian marginalised, Pakatan is attempting to cut the bonds that keep Malaysians strapped to race-identity politics that are now horribly passé.

That is the reason why the coalition deserves the support of Indians, not just because our 7-plus percent size in the overall population is too insignificant to matter in any case, but because this is the more far-sighted way for our downtrodden to scale the ladder of socio-economic mobility.

---

R KENGADHARAN is one of the five Hindraf leaders who was detained under the Internal Security Act in the wake of the movement's historic 2007 rally in Kuala Lumpur.