Just came back from a short visit back to Bolehland and as usual am quite depressed by the place while relishing the food there.
The big event that occurred this trip was the demonstration by about 20,000 Malaysians Indians of the Hindu faith demanding, of all things, RM 14 trillion compensation from the UK for bringing indentured laborers to Malaysia country and exploiting them for the last 150 years.
The idea of the class action suit that the leaders of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) is so out of nowhere that everyone sees through the ruse. It was an attempt by dissenting leaders of the Indian community in Malaysia to send a strong message of protest against Samy Vellu, who has been the leader of the Malaysian Indian Congress(MIC) since the dinosaurs walked the earth. The MIC is an Indian-based (non-Malaysians may find all this racial references strange but the truth is that race is the ingle most important factor in Malaysian politics) party that is part of the ruling Barisian Nasional coalition and it claims to represent the Indian community.
The problem, however, is that Samy Vellu – like many long-serving leaders of the Barisan – has been so comfortable that he has failed to look after the interests of the Indian community. Many of the Indian community in Malaysia were shipped over by the British as indentured laborers to work in rubber estates.
Although some of the Indians in Malaysia have done well – including Ananda Krishnan, who’s touted as the richest man in Malaysia and part Indian Mahathir Mohamad, who managed to convince the Malays that he was not an Indian and rode the coattails of Malay nationalism to become prime minister – most of the Indians, who are mostly Tamils, have had a rough ride.
Over the past decade or so the community’s economic well being has slipped against the Chinese, who are aggressive businessmen and professionals, and the Malays, who benefited from affirmative action. As a result their community got poorer. One of the ridiculous manifestations of this new road to poverty, as Unspun recalls, is that soem years ago newspapers were writing about how Indians had taken over the triads that are as traditionally Chinese as Mooncakes.
The increasing frustration manifested itself in the rally last Sunday where 20,000 Indians took to the streets in Kuala Lumpur. By most independent accounts it was a peaceful demonstration but there were also scuffles with the police. The talk in KL is that the police overreacted again and came down on the demonstrators with excessive force, thereby angering yet another community.
As susual the mainstream media played down the numbers and the significance of the event while bloggers have uploaded their reports, photos and videos on YouTube. The good thing was that the Malaysian Information Minister Zainudin Maidin was dispatched to London after his boo boo with Al Jazeera, so although there were stupid statements from Malaysian Ministers it did not go down to moronic levels.
Looking at how the demonstrators were handled, Unspun thinks that Malaysia willbe seeing more demonstrations in the year to come. The reason is simple: The government is not engaging its dissidents; yet at the same time it does not have the appetite to clamp down hard on them.
In such a situation, dissidents become emboldened and will continue to push the envelope. Something then has got to give.
Tomorrow: conversations with concerned Malaysians about the future of their country and a short visit to the National Press Club where some hefty bloggers hang out.
Unspun 
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