Hindraf is on the wrong track

COMMENT Our intention is not to engage in polemics with Hindraf but to weigh in on the current debate on Hindraf's plan of socio-economic advancement for the Indian poor and how that vision can best be fulfilled.

We feel we have a right to our views as Malaysians and as ISA detainees of the Hindraf-led campaign of late 2007 that culminated in the historic march of Nov 25 that year.

That march was crucial to the withdrawal of Indian electoral support for BN in the 12th general election of March 2008, a move that resulted in the unprecedented denial of a two-thirds majority to the coalition that has ruled the country since independence in 1957.

Much good to the national polity has since resulted from that and Hindraf must be credited with having pulled off an event that helped produce an election result of great effect to the nation.

But to attribute exceptional importance to the Hindraf-led march is to replicate the same mistakes that have led an Umno-dominated BN to its present predicament - the looming loss of majority support among Malaysian voters.

Now, by demanding of Pakatan Rakyat - a vehicle forged in the aftermath of the March 2008 election - that they sign on the dotted line backing Hindraf's blueprint for the Indian poor and set aside more than a dozen of seats for the Hindu rights movement to contest at the 13th general election, Hindraf is positioning itself against the essential nature of the tides let loose by the tsunami of 308.

The effect of the tides is to reduce the race-based obsession by which the BN has long approached the problems afflicting our polity. Everything is seen through the lens of race, and in the peculiar situation of this country, its attendant: religion.

This has eventuated in the myopia and hallucination that have marked the BN approach and brought it to the advanced decay of its rule, so evident at all levels of our society that the electorate now harkens to the Pakatan call for change.

60% households exist on RM1,500 and below

Change to what?

Essentially, a needs - as distinct from a race-based approach - to the urgent problems of the nation: the gross inequalities of income that see 60 percent of households exist on RM1,500 a month and less.

The problems of the Indian poor, who admittedly form a disproportionately large percentage of those households earning RM1,500 and less a month, are urgent, but no more so than that of the Malay, Chinese, Dayak and KadazanDusunMurut poor.

To claim that they are more urgent is to succumb to the race-mania and hallucination that have characterised the sterile and ultimately self-defeating Umno-BN approach.

Pakatan has articulated and has pledged its allegiance to the needs-based approach which is the sanest way out of the political cul de sac that Umno-BN had brought the country to.

We have good reason to believe in the sincerity of their pledge and in their sensitivity to the electoral consequences should they fail to deliver on their promise.

We feel that Pakatan should be given a chance to do what they pledged to do; that Hindraf should not place provisos on their support for Pakatan; and that Hindraf should continue as a pressure group rather than opt for electoral contest.

Hindraf's current stance, as articulated by its chief P Waythamoorthy, will accentuate rather than alleviate the race-based approach to the problems of the Malaysian poor, an approach that is ultimately a deadend.

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V GANABATIRAU and K VASANTHA KUMAR were among five Hindraf leaders detained under ISA in 2007.