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Down2Earth by Terence Fernandez

THE weekend was not a convenient time to be an Indian.

As if the traffic jams resulting from road-blocks before the rally organised by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) weren’t bad enough; once you reached the barricade, there was a possibility of being subject to an inspection. If you are lucky, just a quick glance or having a torchlight in your face. Otherwise, you may have to pop open your car boot and pray that the walking stick in it that you just bought for paatee (grandma) will not be regarded as a weapon.

It does not matter if you are northern Indian, southern Indian, yellow Indian, red Indian or chindian. As far as the police were concerned, anyone who looked Indian or dressed Indian was a suspected protester. Heck, I heard even the “Ten Little Indian Boys” were frisked!

Of course, if you were Indian and did not participate, some members within your community would label you a traitor!

And on Sunday, every Indian on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) was suspected of going to Jalan Ampang. Even the cops rode the trains, randomly asking Indian passengers where there were heading to.

As it turned out, our men in blue had some help from fate. The Sentul line which services areas housing a vast number of Indians, was disrupted due to a derailment on Saturday.

Call it racial profiling, but considering the circumstances, one cannot fault the police for taking precautions – however over-reactive they may seem. You see, unlike the Bersih rally three weeks ago calling for free and fair elections, the Hindraf rally was one that could result in extremely ugly scenes.

For one, while Bersih touched on the core of our democracy – fair polls – Hindraf was pushing race and religion to the fore.

And as we have experienced from our own past, demonstrations hinging on race and religion have the potential of spiralling out of control. We should be thankful that all we saw were at most, skirmishes, with rocks and stones traded for tear gas canisters and water cannon spray infused with a masala mix.

Other than shooting water cannons into the Batu Caves temple grounds in retaliation for being pelted, the police largely exercised restraint. Otherwise, it would be bound to labelled as a “racial clash”.

Hindraf may have defied a court order and headed for the British High Commission to deliver a memorandum to the Queen to support a class-action suit against Her Majesty’s government for bringing Indians to Malaysia 150 years ago as indentured labourers and exploiting them. But this is just a façade for the main aim of underscoring issues affecting Indians in this country.

While its intentions may be noble, the organisers of Hindraf could have done their community a disservice if the rally had turned violent. All you needed was someone with questionable motives to wreak havoc to hijack the rally for his own agenda.

Did the organisers ever think of the repercussions if a handful of non-Indians were hurt in the melee?

Considering what the rally could have turned into, the authorities could justify prosecuting Hindraf’s key-players for sedition. However, by doing so, they have also tied their hands as in future, any form of sedition – be it chants on the streets or rhetoric at a political assembly must be dealt with equally.

Now, the right thing to do is for those in power to look beyond the demonstration and focus on the substance of Hindraf’s issues. The Selangor Government may argue that it demolishes ALL illegal houses of worship. The MIC can reason that it is a waste of resources if Tamil schools with only a handful of pupils stay open. The prudent thing would be for these children to be absorbed by larger schools.

Also, while there would be differing points of view among Indians on whether to support (or be seen to be supporting) Hindraf, Sunday’s demonstration showed that there is a sizeable discontented lot.

The MIC which portrays itself as the champion of Indians must ask itself why this is so. Dismissing protesters as “stooges of the Opposition” is a cheap attempt at avoiding the issues. Are these people the ones who slipped through the cracks and have not obtained their share of the economic pie?

As far as the Government is concerned, it will address these issues on the advice of the MIC and its social arm – Yayasan Strategik Sosial. Has the party been feeding it with the right information or merely painting a rosy picture? Any marginalised member of society is a bane to the nation and no right-thinking Government will allow such a situation to fester.

One lesson we can take away from this episode is that taking a hard line towards dissent merely tends to aggravate discontent.

And while they draw attention to a cause, street protests can be counter-productive to a nation’s growth. Discourse which imbued with mutual respect and compromise has always been the way forward for us. Why then is this culture of taking to the streets suddenly taking root? Could it be that some of us have stopped
listening?

Terence is deputy news editor (special reporting and investigations) of theSun. He can be reached at terence@thesundaily.

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