The real power is not with BN or Pakatan

Hindraf chairman P Waythamoorthy pens his political thoughts while on his hunger strike – third day today.

COMMENT

By P Waythamoorthy

This is the third day of my hunger viratham (hunger strike). I have begun limiting my physical movement so I can conserve the energy for what lies ahead.

The viratham feeds me with spiritual strength that no food can substitute. That is the nourishment I truly need. This period of viratham is going to be a creative period.

Yesterday, I addressed the immediate plans for the way forward for the minority Indian poor.

Today I wish to discuss why I think the political class wants to kill off Hindraf’s five year blueprint to bring the Indian poor into the mainstream of national development.

Before I get into discussing the whys of this question, I need to clarify that indeed politicians on both sides of the divide do want to kill off the blueprint.

Umno’s first approach has been to completely ignore that any such initiative exists. This is the typical first response. They have not responded to our overtures to them for a discussion on the blueprint for a good six months now.

The next approach (and we are beginning to see traces of that) is to hijack portions of the blueprint and maybe also the tone of the blueprint and hope to render Hindraf’s blueprint document redundant in the process.

The proof will be in their election manifesto when it comes out. They are hoping to skirt the issue altogether for now and hope to sail through these elections, and then in the post-election period hope for a natural death to the document. Their pretending is their biggest initiative to kill off the document.

As for Pakatan Rakyat, the situation is a little bit more complex as we have been in discussion with them these last six months. First when the discussions started we were given verbal agreements by the very top and they hoped we would accept that as sufficient commitment, and then they take over. But when we insisted on a binding endorsement, then gears began to shift.

Delay tactics of engaging us in meeting after wasted meetings and hoping to drag this process on for as long, to minimise any impact of a breakdown of the talks was attempted. But that has not worked either.

If they could not kill the document, then kill the messenger was what they tried next– so they began to hit at our moral grounds, by insinuating that we were only interested in seats to contest in the elections, attempting to make us out into greedy cheating politicians.

Trying to make us look like wolves in sheepskin. They did not have much more to go on, on that count as we made it clear our priorities are the blueprint then the seats. But they persist with this approach.

The next thing they tried was using argument that the blueprint demands were inconsistent with that sacrosanct Pakatan principle of “beyond racial boundaries”.

They backtracked on that too because of the backlash. They then resorted to hijacking a clear portion of the blueprint for inclusion in their election manifesto to get by that difficulty.

The puppet masters

Now, the latest attempt has been to cleverly use the Indian leaders within their party to hit out at us – to further divide and rule, something that has been practiced by Umno all these years.

There probably will be more attempts as they have not succeeded in killing off the blueprint. Now let me get to why both parties are so earnest about achieving this goal.

Our theory is that both BN and Pakatan are just puppets. The real power lies with the puppet masters at the back.

The puppet masters are the political and economic elite of the country. They are the people who own this country – all the major assets of the country are owned by them.

They call the policy shots as far as the allocation of the resources of the country are concerned and they use various devices, methods and processes to achieve this.

BN or Pakatan, they are just tools to create an illusion. Of course what I say is advanced political theory. But hold these thoughts and ruminate over them. This is a central theme all common people must become well aware of. This is central to our understanding of how things work in our universe.

Hindraf’s political platform is entirely about correcting the historical injustices, and gross and serious violation of human rights of the Indian poor since the time the Indian coolie was brought in by the white colonialists into Malaya.

The injustice and violations of the rights of the poor continue till today. Our firm belief is that none of this happened as if in a fit of absent mind. They were all results of conscious decisions by the political and economic elite of the country. That is still true today.

So, Hindraf is meeting the elite eye to eye in its blueprint demands. Hindraf is effectively demanding that the elite accept that they committed these atrocities and demand they atone for it by implementing comprehensive programs of correction.

The proposals in the blueprint are entirely justifiable, no matter which way you look at it. The issue of racism does not arise at all. Only the defenders of the elite–the puppets use this as a convenient argument.

We are actually engaging in this conversation with the elite through the political party puppets. And look at how vehemently the political party puppets use convenient and self serving arguments to defend the position of the elite .

The puppets may be two political coalitions, but the puppet master is only one. So, the fundamental policies will be one.

In the contention between these political parties one-upmanship becomes their real policy. Remove the chaff and what you get is the same set of policies at the end of the day from the two parties.

We got a glimpse of that with Anwar Ibrahim’s response to the Australian media when questioned about Lynas the other day. The same policy comes through. You can give any number of reasons to justify and once you are in power, a lot more comes into play for you.

Hindraf operates with this model – a model, in our opinion that is devoid of the illusions that the elite want to create to control us and everything else.

That briefly is my analysis of the reasons why both sides of the political divide want to see the blueprint killed off.

They do not think any such transgression has occurred as we insist. In their worldview this is normal. So what we ask is “terlalu”.

P Waythamoorthy is the Hindraf chairperson. He has been on his hunger strike since March 10.