Malaysia: Truly Asia?

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A group fighting for Hindu rights in Malaysia has united some and alienated others.

Saturday, 04 April 2009 | Monish Shah

On November 25, 2007, an estimated 20,000 ethnically Indian Hindus gathered in the streets of Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to protest against government discrimination. The backdrop of the state-owned Petronas Twin Towers, Malaysia’s foremost symbol of modernity and progress, served as a damning indictment of the faults that now divide Malaysian society.

When Malaysia (then Malaya), along with many other Southeast Asian countries, became independent in the 1950s, many political experts thought its tremendous racial and religious diversity made it a tinderbox, a potential “Balkans of the East.” Seeming to prove them wrong, Malaysia’s steady economic growth helped bring about prosperity that ensured at least a peaceful coexistence among the different ethnic groups. Malaysia’s story of prosperity and harmony, a model of similar trends across Asia, prompted an international tourism ad campaign with the tagline: “Malaysia: Truly Asia.”

Yet beneath that veneer, frustrations among the country’s Indian minority had been bubbling under the surface for decades before they were finally aired at the protest in November 2007. The unexpected intensity and broad support for the protests within the Hindu minority came as a rude shock to the Malay community and the ethnic Malay establishment that dominates the state and its institutions.

A group known as Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) emerged as a major player behind the protests. Frustrated by the Malaysian government’s positive discrimination towards indigenous Malays, Waytha Moorthy, a lawyer by profession, founded HINDRAF soon after seeking counsel on the issue from Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin, the Malaysian king, in January 2006—but to no avail. The Malaysian government reacted to the protests, which were the culmination of HINDRAF’s efforts, by jailing Moorthy’s brother along with four other HINDRAF leaders, under a dated pre-independence law, the Internal Security Act.

Speaking to the Globalist, Waytha Moorthy, in exile in London, asserted that the jailings were illegal. “This act was illegally invoked under the guise of national security to silence the legitimate voice of democracy in Malaysia,” he said. Initially in self-imposed exile, Moorthy has now had his Malaysian passport revoked, making him, in his words, “de facto stateless.” He added that the five protest leaders are still being detained “without having been charged in open court, with no opportunity to defend themselves.” This is, according to Moorthy, an indictment of the independence and fairness of the Malaysian judiciary. But the Indian Hindus’ woes go back much further.

An Old “New” Policy

Since independence, Malaysia has had a partisan, race-based political system. The ruling coalition consists of the main Malay-Muslim party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), and parties representing the ethnic Chinese and Indian communities. The Malays, or Bumiputeras (sons of the soil), who were historically disadvantaged under colonialism, were accorded special entitlements under the benignly titled New Economic Policy, which gave them privileges in employment, education, and business. The policy was started in 1971 as a response to race riots on May 13, 1969, between the Malay and Chinese communities, a result of the Malays’ grievances regarding their poor economic conditions. The Chinese community has long held significant economic and financial power, mitigating the domination of political power by the Malays. But that arrangement left the Indian community feeling powerless and deeply frustrated.

In recent years, many Indians, who are mostly Hindu, have been aggrieved by a new perceived abuse: the destruction of Hindu temples. The Associated Press reported that eight temples were destroyed over three months from February to May 2006, ostensibly for occupying land illegally. HINDRAF claimed in a November 2007 letter to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that a Hindu temple is destroyed every three weeks in Malaysia. The lack of accurate and unbiased news coverage in Malaysia makes the exact number of destroyed temples difficult to verify, but none deny that the pattern is real.

Moorthy joined forces with human rights organizations such as the Minority Rights Group International and Amnesty International to protest this situation. Aside from the ignominy and agony of seeing local temples destroyed, the Hindu community witnessed a Malaysian Hindu soldier, Maniam Moorthy (no relation to Waytha Moorthy), a national hero as a member of Malaysia’s first-ever expedition to Mount Everest, buried by the government as a Muslim. According to Waytha Moorthy, this highly controversial incident served as a catalyst to spark the formation of HINDRAF.

Though it has united Indians around its cause, HINDRAF may have further polarized Malaysian society by emboldening its opposition at the same time. Some Malays have taken umbrage at HINDRAF’s emergence, seeing it as an affront to the proper status quo as currently enshrined in Article 153 of the Federal Constitution: “It shall be the responsibility of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong [the King of Malaysia] to safeguard the special position of the Malays.”

In response to the rise of HINDRAF, Johan Saravanamuttu, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and an expert on Malaysian politics, said, “These incidents have put a greater emphasis on ethnicity in politics.” Also, he argued, greater racial emphasis accentuates the partisan climate in Malaysian politics: “These extravagant demands probably damaged the cause in the minds of many Malaysians by making HINDRAF look more extreme.”

But he stressed that most Malays empathized with the Indians’ demands, seeing them not so much as challenges to Malay hegemony but as expressions of frustration with Indian marginalization. Adriana Nordin Manan, a Malay researcher in politics and social sciences, said, “People across the ethnic spectrum are beginning to see the New Economic Policy as a policy that was good in the beginning but needs to be reviewed in order to benefit the poor from all the ethnic groups, the majority of whom are Malay to begin with.” She added, “I hope that Malaysia becomes a nation of people who regard themselves as citizens, where not everything is seen as a zero sum game between the ethnic groups.”

A Shift in Mindset

Indeed, HINDRAF may have sparked a national soul-searching exercise that has led many to rethink the structure of Malaysian society. Moorthy said of the socioeconomic policies in the country, “There has been a shift in mindset among all Malaysians.”

While Malaysia’s Indians remain a politically weak constituency unlikely to bring about broad political change in Malaysia’s partisan race-based political system, the election last March, which saw the incumbent political party lose votes in all communities, supported Moorthy’s idea. Saravanamuttu said, “The issues HINDRAF raised have resonated deeply across the board and made a palpable, real impact on the election results.” He cited analysts’ estimates that the greatest swing of votes from the incumbent Barisan National coalition to opposition parties was seen among Indian voters, with a change of about 35-40 percent.

This shift was further given credence by a poll in June and July 2008 by the independent Merdeka Center that showed that a majority across all races felt that Barisan Nasional’s “race-based affirmative action policy is obsolete and must be replaced with a merit-based policy” for a truly fair redistribution of wealth.

In response to calls for change, the Federal Government has introduced the “Race Relations Act,” which aims to build stronger interracial ties. Saravanamuttu is skeptical of the move. “This act [will] prove to be of limited effectiveness, for it proscribes rather than liberates race relations in the country,” he said. Other more positive harbingers for Malaysia were a declaration last March by the newly elected Penang state minister that his state will not follow the New Economic Policy and a statement by deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak in October urging his party to end the New Economic Policy, something that, if realized, would go a long way toward alleviating Indian anger. Yet the same month also saw the home minister declaring HINDRAF to be an illegal organization.

Meanwhile, Moorthy ruefully told the Globalist, a generation has grown up knowing tension, not tolerance. “When I was growing up, my father’s friends, of various races, used to come visit and celebrate together diwali with open house festivities, inviting friends and neighbors,” he said. “In recent years, my nephews and nieces do not get their friends visiting them anymore.” In November 2008, HINDRAF urged Malaysian Indians not to hold diwali open houses at all to protest deeply entrenched government discrimination. That the lights went out on diwali, the festival of lights and the holiest day in the year for Hindus, was at once a bitter irony and a symptom of the ills plaguing all of Malaysian society.

Monish Shah is a freshman in Morse College.