Draft Memo to Agong

8/3/2019 Draft Memo to Agong

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A Petition to

Seri Paduka Baginda Yang di-Pertuan Agong

Sultan Abdul Halim Mu'adzam Shah

By

HINDRAF MAKKAL SAKTHI

To Uphold The Rights and Legitimate Interests

of the Indian Community in Malaysia

14th February 2012


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Your Royal Highness,

We at HINDRAF are very happy that Your Royal Highness is now our 14th

Yang DiPertuan Agong. This

happiness derives from the fact that we are all Your Royal Highness s subjects and also from Your

Royal Highness s proclamation at the Installation on the 7th

of December 2011 that The Agong is

the umbrella over the people and the people are the pillars of the Agong. The Agongs greatest

role is to ensure there will be no cruelty, and destruction, to the people and to the country. In a

constitutional monarchy system, the Agong is the arbitrator, the balancing power so that there

will be peace, stability and public order. We are extremely happy to hear our Monarch make such

a balanced and morally significant proclamation.

In this context we would like to bring to Your Royal Highnesss attention an issue pertaining to the

marginalized Indian community in Malaysia and seek Your Royal Highnesss intervention to redress a

problem that is a direct result of the application of morally wrong principles of governance by the

UMNO led Government. This has had the deleterious effect of marginalizing large sections of the

Indian community through the erosion of their rights and freedom.

As Your Royal Highness is aware, the bulk of the Indians were brought into Malaya from the 1790s

as indentured labour by the British. The Indians thus brought over have worked the land for the then

British Rulers and subsequently for the Malay Rulers. The Indians had been promised by various

British Residents who advised the then Malay Rulers of the States that the migrant Indian labourers

be given land to settle in Malaya upon completion of their labour tenures. The decisions of the

British Residents were made with the express involvement and approval of the then Malaya Rulers

as it was thought that such a policy would motivate the continuing migration of Indian labour to

produce the wealth that lay nascent at the time.

The Indians labourers contributed to the production of significant wealth in the cocoa, spices,

sugar, coffee, rubber and palm oil plantations, in the building of railways, roads, in education,

medicine, law and various other departments of the Governments. In these roles they contributed

significantly to developing and integrating Malaya into the modern economy of the world

throughout the late 1800s and through the 1900s. Your Royal Highness may be aware that in 1957

at the inception of the nation, the industry of the Indians contributed almost 70% of the Malayan

Governments revenues- in the form of receipts from rubber.

However after the completion of their indenture periods the Indians were not settled with land as

had been promised. They just stayed on scraping a living using only their wits. What surfaced thisserious historical deception was the significant decline in rubber prices in the 1970s. This resulted in

the conversion of significant tracts of rubber plantation land to oil palm cultivation and to other

commercial, industrial and residential developments and the mass push out from the estates of the

Indian labourer communities. There are estimates of up to eight hundred thousands who were

evicted in this manner. The fact that they were all landless under these circumstances affected much

of the subsequent history.

What should have occurred to have facilitated this massive migration did not occur. Had they been

given the land as was promised the situation today would have been quite different. No alternative

job training opportunities were provided for the forced urban migrants. There was no compensationgiven whatsoever to tide over the transition, no alternative housing was provided to these landless


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labourers and no alternative land as discussed above was provided to settle on, like the Felda

scheme.

These people were left stranded and dispossessed. There were no policies or programs facilitated by

the government to protect their welfare and their rights, regardless of their significant contributions

to the economy. What happened alongside was a decimation of a whole rural social system of the

Indian poor. The Tamil schools, the Hindu temples, the Hindu burial grounds, the few social

amenities were all now taken away by default from these workers who moved from rural

communities into urban slums in the fringes of the urban centres. An underclass community began

to emerge. This problem was ignored and the Indian poor community has been deliberately left to

their very meagre resources to fend for themselves, by the UMNO led government for more than 40

years now.

Large part of the national development budget was channelled through scores of agencies such

FELDA, FELCRA, RISDA etc., in respect of the various development programs for the rural and

agricultural poor. All of those programs and projects only benefited the majority Malay community

without any allocation of funds in any of these programs and projects for the displaced Indians ,who

indeed were a large part of rural Malaya/Malaysia and who would have contributed in more

productive ways had they been given the opportunity.

The New Economic Policy which was implemented from 1970 and its successive economic programs

have ignored the needs of the Indian community and we lay this blame squarely on the UMNO led

racially motivated Government , which implemented various race based programs in the name of

the NEP.

All of this has resulted in abysmal socio-economic performance of the Indian community. TheMalaysian Indians have the highest suicide rate, highest number of Malaysians killed in police

custody as a consequence of the unofficial shoot to kill policy, highest rates for involvement in crime.

There are an estimated 300,000 stateless Malaysian Indians. They are the spill over from the

displaced plantation worker problem. This statelessness leads to larger issue like inability to pursue

education, seek jobs, obtain driving license, get legally married and own property.

The Indian poor community is a community in distress and is in a trap that it cannot extricate itself

from without adequate State intervention . The UMNO led Government with their racial paradigm

has not shown the will to solve the problem at its root, rather the symptoms are swept away from

view . This has caused the problem to swell. How can this ever be morally justified a governmentturning its back on its own people.

There have at best been miniscule allocations for development programs targeted at the Indians

specifically, and with no correlation to the magnitude or the gravity of the need. There are less than

2% Indians employed in the various arms of the Government (even then, mostly in the low ranking

jobs), less than 2% in public universities and tertiary public educational institutions. Not only are all

these unfair in relative performance, but also in absolute performance all because of the racial

preoccupation of the UMNO led government. This is a far cry from the situation at independence.

The rot has been caused by the post-independence policies of the UMNO led government.


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We at HINDRAF, are not against policies and programs to uplift the Malay community. We are happy

to see the national wealth seep down in society. Our main concern, however is that the upliftment

programs of the government are racially unbalanced and is based on a morally wrong precept of

race or ethnicity. We believe the Government should be the Government for all the people,

regardless of ethnicity - which they have shown through their allocation of the national wealth to be

not.

Various attempts in approaching the government to resolve these serious and pressing issues

concerning the Malaysian Indians has resulted in very little progress. It appears that there is no

political will amongst the ruling UMNO to resolving these issue in a fair and just manner.

We at HINDRAF ask for nothing more than to return the legitimate rights of the marginalized Indian

poor as Your Royal Highnesss subjects , to be allowed to live a life of dignity and to live a life of hope

and of equal opportunity to participate more fully in the building of our nation. With social

engineering of the NEP large section of our population, the Malays, have progressed significantly.

We are happy for them. But it is time for the UMNO led Government to recognize the serious

imbalance in their racially slanted policies and to institute appropriate corrective measures to

redress the imbalance and to do the same for the Indians. But they have shown no inclination

whatsoever to make the needed policy changes to redress the problem of the marginalized Indians.

Your Royal Highness, we think it is time for some wise intervention. We seek Your Royal Highnesss

intervention to set matters right. We have a situation where a process which is morally wrong

underlies the policies of the current Government. The race based and racially slanted policies of the

UMNO led Government has resulted in the development of Institutionalized racism in the country.

Racism is morally wrong and we believe that only the supreme wisdom of Your Royal Highness can

help to eradicate such a morally wrong paradigm of governance.

It is expressly stated in Article 153(1) that It shall be the responsibility of the Yang DiPertuan Agong

(YDPA) to safeguard the special position of the Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak and the

legitimate interest of other communities

The purpose of Article 153 is that it confers reasonable powers on the government under the

purview of Your Royal Highness to act as a check to prevent the abuse by the present government to

oppress, suppress and marginalize its people and its citizenry on the basis of human rights as it fails

to address the legitimate interest of other communities as protected under Article 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 of

the Federal constitution.

The grievances of the Indian community is longstanding and needs redressing urgently. The ruling

government is not serious about addressing these problems. We have steadfastly been pointing this

out to the UMNO led Government and for that they have unconstitutionally declared our movement

illegal.

HINDRAFs clearly stated objectives are:

1) To bring the Indian poor into the mainstream of national development

2) To eliminate all racist and religious supremacist state sponsored policies .


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We believe these are more than morally sanctioned objectives. Also all our approaches are well

within the confines of what is guaranteed in the Malaysian Federal Constitution and laws.

We as your subjects , now present this petition to Your Royal Highness and humbly request the

following:

1) To advise the current Government to give us HINDRAF MAKKAL SAKTHI formal recognition to

represent the Indian marginalized and poor as provided for in the Federal Constitution.

2) To provide us with an audience, so that we can provide Your Royal Highness with documented

facts and to provide evidence of Human rights abuses and gross negligence of the ruling

government in addressing the woes of the Indians in Malaysia in relation to their legitimate rights as

a citizen of Malaysia in adherence with the Federal constitution. They have denied the Indian

community in the country their fundamental rights of equality. And it is a historical truth that there

can be no dignity where there is no equality not for any of the subjects of Your Royal Highness, not

ever.

We come to Your Royal Highness because we believe Your Royal Highnesss reign has potential to

bring about the needed change based on Your Royal Highnesss proclamations.

We thank Your Royal Highness in anticipation.

Daulat Tuanku !

Signed on Behalf of all the Marginalized Indians in Malaysia

Sambulingam

National Coordinator

HINDRAF MAKKAL SAKTHI

14th

February 2012

Draft Memo to Agong

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Transcript of Draft Memo to Agong