Having recently received a mass forwarded e-mail about an upcoming conference on the future of Indians, I was interested to see who had taken the initiative to organise this event. In any event, another conference is just BN's and Pakatan's delay tactics.
It seems to me that what needs to be done for the Indians is clear for all except the politicians and current Indian 'champions'. The promoters in the case of this conference are P Sivakumar, Malaysian Indian Business Association (Miba) president and Denison Jayasooria.
On Mr Sivakumar, I read with interest a letter from SA Kumaresan recently who correctly questioned the contributions of Miba since it was set up by Sivakumar more than 10 years ago now.
Miba has generated next to nothing for the Indian community apart from organising talk shop after talk shop, where like-minded people get together and lament dishonest politicians and poor delivery but never ever themselves step up to do anything about it.
He has managed Miba the MIC way, without holding proper elections and summarily dismissing people from his organising committee according to his whims and fancies. It would be a surprise to many if this Johor Bahru organisation of not more than 25 people pretending to be a national organisation ever achieves anything.
He has excluded the SMC and other notable Indian NGOs from this forum, NGOs that actually contribute to the Indian community. This clearly shows that Sivakumar's only motivation is to scale the social ladder and become yet another empty vessel calling oneself an Indian 'champion', content to occupy centre stage but unwilling to sacrifice in order to achieve.
Sivakumar is joined by Denison Jayasooria, the one time protégé of former MIC president S Samy Vellu. Over the last 10 years of Samy Vellu's reign as MIC president, Denison was his trusted brains and one-man think tank.
If anyone can recall any positive changes that were delivered to the Indian community over the last decade of Samy Vellu's reign, many Indians would be interested to know what these are as we all cannot recall any.
Among many other pending matters, how Denison and the MIC foundation, YSS, that Denison led spent RM30 million are still things that have not been cleared up. One thing Denison did do, while under Samy's watchful eye, was to organise conference after conference and conduct a lot of research that never ever amounted to actual improvement in the lives of Indians.
He regularly publishes books compiling the outcomes of the conferences he organises, books that are really not worth the paper they are printed on. The only reason he left Samy is because he was refused a seat and a deputy ministership when he personally approached Samy for this before the 12th general election.
More recently, he was also removed from the Special Implementation Taskforce of the BN government because he wanted to replace Minister Dr S Subramaniam as the chairman of the said taskforce.
In order to shore up his relevance, and rather than take risks and be bold as people like Bersih 2.0 chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan have been, he has chosen to do research loudly i.e. to catch the public eye in hope of maintaining his dwindling relevance to the Indian community.
Furthermore, he and a group of has-beens regularly put out statements from a group called Proham on any issue of the day, content to comment but never to act.
If the initiative to chart the future of the Indian community is now left to people like Sivakumar and Denison and not with members of the Indian community who have actually achieved something real for themselves and for the community, then we Indians are really in trouble.
The BN and Pakatan will not honestly help us out, and if the above two jokers are what we are left with, then we really have to wake up and take notice.
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