Latest developments with Hindraf

COMMENT Hindu Rights Action Force's new relationship with Umno/BN: Isn't it a betrayal of the Indian cause?

What is the Indian cause if it is not an expression of the yearning of the average Indian for a shot at an equal and dignified life? Inequality and indignity are systemic outcomes caused by the skewed distribution of the national resources of this country.

The Indian cause is not served by political alliances per se, but by what the alliance will deliver. There is no religion to this, as some armchair progressives will have us believe. The negotiations around the blueprint over the last several months are really all about that.

The Indian cause in Malaysia is best served by a political alliance that delivers to the Indians the means for a better life. If Umno/BN can deliver that and when Pakatan has plainly refused to, what would be a betrayal to the Indian cause not to take it up or to have gone with Pakatan Rakyat in spite of its known negative policies towards the Indian poor?

Has Hindraf given up its principles by partnering BN and gone with hat in hand to them, in spite of the bashing Hindraf supporters took on Nov 25, 2007?

Hindraf's primary objective is to bring the Indian poor into the national mainstream of development. This objective is based on the principles of social justice, equality and dignity.

In 2007 the bashing that the Indians received on the streets was the beginning. It was a major emotional event for the Indians. From that painful start Hindraf has been through many challenges to get to where it is today - with potential and credible solutions in hand, though and with an unexpected partner.

When these plans get implemented in the next five years, there will be tangible changes to the lives of the marginalised Indians. We have been absolutely guided by our principles in this journey. We have gone to BN not with hat in hand, but with wisdom in our minds and integrity in our hearts.

Is this a sellout of Hindraf by its leaders?

What has not been possible for 56 years is being accomplished right under our noses now by some very skilful leadership within the span of a few months.

A new relationship with a past enemy for mutual benefit cannot be a sellout. Was there a sellout when rapprochement occurred between France and England, which were at war with each other for a hundred years?

Or between Russia and the US the cold war foes, or between Germany and Japan on the one hand and the US on the other, the World War II foes? Purveyors of the sellout theme must have some very personal reasons that they cannot see these developments in a positive light.

Has there been a secret pact between the leaders of Hindraf and leaders of BN?

The entire process of these negotiations has been transparent from when we began in August last year with the return of P Waythamoorthy. The calls to both sides, Pakatan and BN have always been transparent.

If there had been any secret pact with Umno/BN, then that tack taken would have been inappropriate. For, if Pakatan had come through with the endorsement earlier, it would have screwed up any secret arrangements that may have existed.

Pakatan did have the first shot, after all. They did not come through. Serious discussions started with Umno only on March 25, barely a moth ago and they came through on April 18. Up till April 15, we were ready for discussion with Pakatan, but they totally failed. Secret pact, hmm....

 The conspiracy theorists from Pakatan have been working overtime on this theme of a secret pact. This way they want to confuse the people on this historic deal. We will see the result of all this on May 5.

Hindraf has been extremely critical of Umno's past policies, what happens to all that criticism now? Has Hindraf forgotten the 56 years of Umno's policies that have resulted in the marginalisation of Indians?

The past will not go away. Our views of the past will also remain. What will change will be the way those views will determine our future actions. We will continue with our push for change. Hindraf will continue as a human rights NGO regardless of any involvement in government.

Our current priority is the economic programme for uplifting the Indian poor with this blueprint. We will continue our human rights work, only we believe we will now have more leverage over national policy in these areas, given our experience.

We will continue to be change agents. Our detractors will shoot this down as highly improbable. That is their prerogative.

Will BN honour its part of the agreement?

No Malaysian prime minister has ever apologised publicly to the Indians for past lapses. No Malaysian government has ever signed anything like this in full public view.

Giving 1.8 percent of the annual budget of the government for the next five years to solve a longstanding and nagging problem is a very small price. The opportunity to hold Hindraf responsible for the delivery of the blueprint plans is a gift.

All the BN government needs to do is to provide the funds, the authority and supervise for consistency with all the rest of what they do.

Why will the government now want to play around, especially with Hindraf, which is known to be able to kick up storms quite readily, unless it means what it has signed?

Besides, in a recent risk analysis that we performed, BN came out two-to-one better in the risk rating compared with Pakatan in the risks of implementation. Yes, there is risk, but we have assessed the risk and think it is worth taking, considering the potential benefits.

On the relationship with Pakatan

Pakatan stands for change, why are you not embracing change?

Pakatan says it stands for change. The change they talk about at best will only serve the business community, not the poor. Not the Indian poor for sure.

From the squirming we have experienced with Anwar Ibrahim, we are convinced that all talk of change is no more than mollifying rhetoric.

And look at how Lim Guan Eng promotes mega projects in Penang despite noisy protests from the people. Opinions of the people do not seem important in their worldview. So, what change are we talking about?

We are for change. But Pakatan is not the change that we need. Pakatan is not the change the country needs. We need changes in policies, not in names and faces only.

We have no problems embracing true change. However Pakatan does not represent true change to us.

Pakatan stands for multiracialism. Is that is why it cannot endorse Hindraf's Blueprint?

Pakatan says it stands for multiracialism. If that were really the case, it should dissolve its individual parties and merge into one large, truly multiracial party. So, why doesn't it?

It is really all that multiracial as it says, or is it just some more rhetoric? The way it handled the recent Pakatan manifesto shows the big gap between what Pakatan says and what it does.

Pakatan says the manifesto transcends racial boundaries when it clearly does not and then it goes and eats the humble pie by running to add a few more pledges to the Indians, making the manifesto no more race blind, contradicting its earlier protestations.

Then DAP plagiarises our blueprint, which in the first place they said was a racially-orientated document and call it a grand declaration violating their policy of transcending race. DAP does not mean any of what it says when it comes to the affairs of the poor Indians.

Has Hindraf been inept in dealing with Pakatan?

We had 24 meetings with Pakatan, all at our behest. We saw how they were bungling in the way they went about the meetings. The words did not match their thoughts. Left hand did not know what right hand was doing.

We had to deal with three different paradigms. There either was no understanding of the Indian problem or there was only a slanted understanding, at best. In spite of all these setbacks we did not give up.

If calling out impostors as 'mandores' amounts to ineptness and that is the reason for the failure, all I can say is this is a very convenient way of passing off something fundamental as a minor aberration.

Hindraf-BN memorandum of understanding

The MOU is an understanding, not an agreement. So what is the worth of the MOU signed between Hindraf and BN?

The MOU clearly states that it is a binding agreement between BN and Hindraf. Further, we consider it binding when the document is signed in full view of the whole country.

All the naysayers say there is no honour in BN. Afterwards, they say, BN will just leave you high and dry, despite the agreement statements and the high profile signing.

However our recent experiences and analysis brings us to other conclusions. In Umno's world view, they do not see the Indians in the country as a threat to their hold on long-term power.

Their fears come from elsewhere. We have just been party to collateral damage in the past, and the blueprint now helps to address that collateral damage.

This MOU document further serves as a record of our understanding of the changes that we have agreed upon. When it comes to implementation, this document will be the reference.

Will there be differences later on in the interpretation? I am sure there will be. But we do not consider that a major risk.

The major risk is whether there is honour behind the words. From what we see now, there does seem to be.

Why didn't the prime minister sign the MOU? Why Tengku Adnan Mansor? And who is Tengku Adnan?

The agreement is between Hindraf and Barisan Nasional. Tengku Adnan is the secretary-general and the administrative head of the BN. It is well within legal norms for him to be the signatory. The prime minister was the witness to the event.

Is the MOU valid as it is signed only by the caretaker government?

The MOU was not signed by the caretaker government. It is signed by Tengku Adnan on behalf of the BN coalition.

What if there is a change in the leadership of Umno/BN? Will the MOU still be valid?

The MOU is between two organisations and their successors in titles and P Waythamoorthy and Tengku Adnan signed respectively for their organisations.

Why did we give up on items 5 and 6 of the original Hindraf Blueprint?

Though it looks like we have given up on those two items, the IPCMC and police brutality and the UN covenants, we have just postponed those issues for later so it will help move on the other more urgent economic issues that affect the Indian poor now.

Besides, the way we see the world moving, it is inevitable that these changes are going to happen, BN or Pakatan. It is the times. And we will continue to be agents of change.

Is the MOU a mockery of the Hindraf Blueprint?

The MOU is no mockery of the blueprint. It is a document that takes into account the reality of today's situation. The moral issues underlying the blueprint are important and we have taken the tack to address them obliquely, for the immediate.

When the poverty situation is addressed effectively, social development will occur as a direct consequence. This will see a reduction of the involvement of Indian youth in crime.

Today many of the killings in custody can be traced to a complex web between these youths, crime syndicates, their bosses, the police and even some who are well placed in society.

But when we reduce the input into that web, the problem will reduce significantly. This is the oblique opportunity we have today with the current plan.

As for the UN covenants on human rights, the proposals when completely implemented will reduce racial discrimination in the system that the Indian poor will face.

We have established a clear quota-based regime for all benefits deriving from the government on the basis of the participation in numbers in the population.

As for bringing the laws of the country to be consistent with these international norms of human rights, we believe social values will have to first change. And we plan to be involved in that effort too.

What happened to the proposal on the Ministry of Minority Affairs?

We have had to concede that point in our negotiations, only to be replaced with a unit in the Prime Minister's Department with full executive authority under the leadership of a Hindraf-nominated individual approved by the prime minister.

Why was the MOU signed only after the dissolution of the Parliament?

The negotiations with the PM only began in late March and we were combing through many details of the Hindraf Blueprint amidst the heavy schedules on both sides.

It took us all of 24 days to finally nail down all the details of the agreement and that took us into the period after the dissolution of the Parliament. There is no hidden agenda here.

Who should be signing the memorandum - the government or BN?

Given the circumstances, the MOU was signed with BN. There is only a caretaker government now and that clearly would not be the party for Hindraf to sign an MOU with.

The MOU is needed because the cooperation is before the election of the government but the delivery of the blueprint is after the election of the government, so an agreement is needed between BN and Hindraf.

Is the MOU just some more election promises, but in a different form? Is the MOU practically useless, because it is not only not legally binding but also made by parties unknown?

Whether the MOU is mere election promises or not is not defined by the document itself. This is defined by the parties involved in the agreement. If they want to view it as being mere election promises, then that is what it is.

I think Pakatan thinks along those lines, given what Abdul Khalid Ibrahim had to say recently on election promises. But if they view it as a morally-binding document and with legal significance, then that is what it becomes.

Given the direction of the liberalisation of our country, we believe that the MOU will be viewed as more than just election promises. The naysayers will have all sorts of arguments against this. It is just their opinions against ours. We all, after all, believe what we want to believe, don't we?

The MOU is between BN and Hindraf, both legal organisations with members. The respective representatives of both organisations signed on behalf. How much clearer can it get?

As they say in Tamil, you can wake up someone who is truly asleep but not someone who is pretending to sleep. Questions like these can only come from people who pretend to be asleep.

Does the DAP's Gelang Patah Declaration have more teeth than this MOU?

There is absolutely no legal force to the Gelang Patah DAP Declaration. There could have been some moral obligation.

Given the Pakatan take on election manifestos and election promises, even that goes out of the window.

So, whoever thinks that the Gelang Patah Declaration has more teeth than this MOU obviously is hallucinating does not know what they are talking about.

What happened to the 18-point demand? Why only four now?

The four proposals of the blueprint are the detailed out proposals for the uplifting of the Indian poor and cover more than 50 percent of what are in the 18 points demand of Hindraf.

The remaining pertain mostly to the human rights objectives of Hindraf, which we will continue to work with the government and other human rights organisations to attain in the longer term.

About Hindraf

Why did Hindraf not reveal the registration of Hindraf promptly?

Hindraf was registered on March 8 and the notification came to us sometime in the second week of March, during Waythamoorthy's hunger strike. We were reserving the announcement to be made at the national convention scheduled for April 21. That is all.

After all the grand revelation of this piece of information was done by S Jayathas, who got the information from me any way, three days before he made a big deal of it at a press conference. There is no skeleton in this cupboard, sorry.

What happens to the case against the United Kingdom government?

The case against the UK government on their negligence of the Indians in the country when the British left in 1957 is still in progress and will continue regardless of developments here in the ground.

The legal process in the UK courts weaves and meanders and takes all sorts of time. We will be hearing more of it in time.

This partnership with BN does not change our tack on the case. In fact some of the paperwork for the case was handled by Waythamoorthy on April 1 and 2, right after he came out of his hunger strike.

What about Hindraf's position on cases like Zulkifli Nordin and death in custody in the future?

Issues like this are not going to go away, nor the politics associated with them. We definitely condemn the utterances by Zulkifli Nordin. Deaths in custody probably will not go away straight off the bat either with this new relationship that we are establishing.

We will seek permanent solutions to these kinds of occurrences in time, but today, as we enter the relationship with BN, we have to enter with our eyes wide open to all these that do not change overnight.

What all of this also suggests is that the old and the new will coexist for some time to come, during a period of transition. We represent the new and these incidents represent the old.

The old will certainly only go away after the new has firmly taken hold. And that is what we will do, consolidate our position, grow our credibility and work on all these other contentious and complicated issues and seek permanent solutions that will become our hallmark.

Considering that Pakatan is making such big politics out of this, look at an even more serious analogous situation on their side. Anwar moved from agriculture minister to deputy prime minister from 1983 to 1998. What about holding him responsible for all that he did to the Indian poor during that time?

I know that he was directly or indirectly responsible for pushing out displaced estate workers from their shanties into what has become urban slums today. He threatened to stop all temple bells from ringing if the Indians of Kampung Rawa of Penang did not comply with his ruling. How long ago was that? Has he apologised for any of this?

In summary, Hindraf is moving positively towards its stated objectives in a plain, transparent and thoughtful manner. Hindraf does not care to play to the gallery of experts in cyberspace. What is important for Hindraf, it does.

Hindraf will continue to be the bold agent of change it has always been. We hope the more discerning readers will be able to see the wisdom beyond the loud noises of our detractors. Our supporters do not participate in the cyber discourse and it may appear there is little support for our position, but come to the ground and see.

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N GANESAN is adviser to the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf)