Malaysia has a recurring amnesia on race

 Concern for the needs of the Indian and Chinese communities only gets the attention of politicians during election cycles.

Watch a Malaysian election unfold and a curious transformation occurs.

Politicians who spent years silent or complicit on the concerns of Indian and Chinese Malaysians suddenly discover eloquence and urgency.

Longhouses get noticed. Temples get cheques. Schools get teachers. Then the ballots are counted, the podiums folded away, and the amnesia returns.

This is not coincidence. It is a pattern, and it deserves to be named.

The 44-year ordeal

Take Bukit Kiara. For 44 years, 98 families, descendants of rubber tappers relocated in 1982, lived in “temporary” longhouses that outlasted three administrations.

Only in June 2026, as election season heated up, did the government finally break ground on permanent housing, complete with a RM1 million maintenance subsidy and formal recognition of the Sri Maha Mariamman temple on site as a legal non-Muslim place of worship, backed by a RM100,000 allocation.

Forty-four years, resolved with remarkable electoral punctuality.

Tamil schools tell the same story. In November 2025, 300 teachers were finally appointed nationwide, closing a chronic gap vernacular educators had flagged for years, with the ministry claiming 99.8% of vacancies filled.

Months earlier, associations were still begging for 500 more secondary school teachers and funding for basic repairs. The need was never secret. The urgency was.

Temples for votes

The cruellest irony is temples. Even as Putrajaya quietly funded the Bukit Kiara temple, activists elsewhere organised the “Himpunan Gerakan Anti Rumah Anutan Haram”.

These were rallies branding Hindu temples illegal and “haram”, or “forbidden”, prompting even DAP’s own youth wing to demand the term “kuil haram” be struck from public life for being “prejudicial, misleading, and hurtful”.

Malaysia Hindu Sangam (MHS) has been calling for years for a proper land regularisation policy, warning that “labelling temples as haram undermines national unity”.

A restrictive 2024 funding bill for non-Muslim worship sites was branded “idiotic, illogical, and absurd” by MIC deputy president M Saravanan. Sacred spaces should never be bargaining chips that appear and vanish with the electoral calendar.

The parasites among us

This is where the real parasites thrive, opportunists who know fear sells better than solutions.

Just this past week, Perikatan Nasional’s election director and Kedah menteri besar Sanusi Nor told a Negeri Sembilan crowd, “Chinese have China, Indians have India … Malays only have Tanah Melayu”.

The remark was widely read as questioning whether Chinese and Indian Malaysians truly belong. He is now under police investigation for public mischief.

It echoes an ugly lineage: PAS president Hadi Awang was named the single biggest amplifier of hate speech during GE15 by a joint university study; Umno Youth’s Akmal Saleh hurled racist remarks at Teresa Kok over halal certification; a Bersatu politician slurred national badminton player S Kisona; and Dr Mahathir Mohamad once declared Malaysia “is not multiracial. It is a Malay country which hosts people from other countries”.

Human rights group Komas, in its Malaysia racism report for 2024, documented 73 separate incidents of racism and xenophobia in a single year, spanning politics, business, education, even parliament.

Everyday Malaysia absorbs the fallout: a 99 Speedmart outlet caught with a “For Malay Only” sign over subsidised rice, another turning away a Punjabi applicant unless he cut his hair and shaved his beard.

These are not isolated blunders; they are residue of a permission structure built by years of unchecked racialised theatre.

The makcik-pakcik who never broke

And yet, the makcik and pakcik at the pasar malam do not break. Camaraderie forged over decades of shared meals and shared streets has proven sturdier than any campaign speech designed to fracture it.

Kasthuri Patto put it plainly: “Malaysians must reject politicians who manipulate and exploit race and religion for their own political survival”.

Azalina Othman Said said it simpler still: “For millions of Malaysians of Chinese and Indian descent, Malaysia is not a temporary stop. Malaysia is their homeland”.

Time to legislate loyalty

If we mean any of this, racial provocation must stop being treated as an unfortunate campaign side-effect and start being treated as a prosecutable offence.

Section 505 of the Penal Code and Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act already exist, so apply them consistently to every party, every time, not selectively when convenient.

We need a standing, non-partisan racial and religious harmony commission with real referral powers to the Attorney-General’s Chambers, able to act within days rather than months after an election.

Stop the temple issue as soon as possible, thus ensuring no one ever politicises it. Sit down with the MHS and devise a firm action plan to resolve this lingering issue.

We need a permanent statutory land regularisation framework for houses of worship, so temples are never again campaign props.

Convert the vernacular school into a fully government school. The school funding and teacher quotas must be written into law and multi-year budgets, insulated from election-season generosity.

And platforms must be held accountable for amplifying hate speech, using existing monitoring data as an evidentiary baseline.

Malaysia’s unity was never the government’s gift to bestow every few years.

It was built, quietly and stubbornly, by ordinary people who never needed a ceramah to remind them how to be neighbours.

It is time our laws protected that fabric as fiercely as our people already do. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.