Government policies are what will ultimately decide the Indian Malaysian community's support for the BN, not the merger of their political parties, says MIC's senator Jaspal Singh.

"The problem is beyond merger. Getting the support of the community depends on policies and a combination of many other things.

NONE"Delivering on promises of the government to ensure that Indians no longer feel marginalised is more important than a merger," Jaspal (left), who is also MIC treasurer, told Malaysiakini today.

While acknowledging that a merger of Indian-based parties may give the community a stronger voice, he said the BN had to look beyond mergers, for this would not necessarily garner wider support for the ruling coalition.

Jaspal said this in response to BN secretary-general Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor's call to Indian-based parties aligned with the BN to merge in order to consolidate the ruling coalition's support base.

Tengku Adnan also called on the MIC to reflect if it was doing something wrong that Indians would resort to creating so many political parties.

‘MIC is improving'
 However, Jaspal denied that MIC was to be blamed for the large number of Indian-based political parties in the country.

"I think after the 2008 (political) tsunami, there were many new political parties, not only Indian parties. It happened across the board as the needs of the people have become complex.

"More traditional parties, like the MIC, Umno and MCA, are not attractive to some people because these parties are not able to change quickly to meet the needs of the people," he said.

However, since then the MIC has been doing a good job and the smaller parties are the ones that are now doing "soul searching".

Jaspal said even though BN only garnered 48 percent of the votes from the Indian Malaysian community in the 13th general election, it should not be viewed solely from a racial lens.

"In the non-urban areas, we got more than 48 percent of the Indian vote but the urban support is not along racial lines and here the voters did not support the government.

"So we cannot blame any one particular community," Jaspal added.

Unlike the other component parties of the BN, MIC managed to arrest its continued slide in GE13 by increasing its parliamentary seats from three to four.