Last November, ethnic Indians’ anger over racial discrimination in Malay Muslim-majority Malaysia erupted on the streets of Kuala Lumpur in spectacular fashion.
HONG KONG: Last November, ethnic Indians’ anger over racial discrimination in Malay Muslim-majority Malaysia erupted on the streets of Kuala Lumpur in spectacular fashion.
On Saturday, it coalesced with more widespread disenchantment with the National Front (BN) to deal the ruling coalition a humbling blow in elections to the parliament and to state assemblies.
Ethnic Indian voters contributed “phenomenally” to the overall election results, acknowledges M Kulasegaran, a re-elected Opposition MP of Indian origin. “The Indian vote swing is unprecedented in Malaysian history,” he told DNA.
“Thanks to their votes, the Opposition parties won many seats where we couldn’t even dream of getting a sizeable number of votes.”
In earlier elections, ethnic Indians traditionally voted for the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), a constituent of the BN, headed by S Samy Vellu, the only Indian Minister in the government. But the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), which spearheaded the November street protests, sees the MIC and Samy Vellu as “lackeys” who have leveraged their “power broker” status for personal gain. Since the November protests, ethnic Indians’ rage has been particularly directed at the MIC and Samy Vellu.
The ‘Makkal Sakthi’ (People’s Power) movement launched by Hindraf has proved itself as a conduit for channelling that ethnic Indian rage into tactical voting. Ethnic Indian accounted for between 10% and 45% of the electorate in at least 66 parliamentary and 140 state assembly seats.
In constituencies where the Malay and Chinese votes were divided, the ethnic Indian vote may have proved decisive in helping the Opposition win.
Indicatively, of the 28 MIC candidates, all but three were trounced. Even Samy Vellu, a veteran of many electoral battles over 29 years, lost his parliamentary seat! “The entire MIC leadership was wiped out,” notes K. Kabilan, editor of the independent news portal Malaysiakini.com. “The party will now have to look to younger leaders to re-energise it,” he told DNA.
Overall, 22 Indian candidates contested 18 parliamentary seats: nine of them contested on the MIC ticket, seven were nominated by the secular, multi-racial Democratic Action Party (DAP) and the rest as candidates of Anwar Ibrahim’s People’s Justice Party (PKR).
In addition, 53 Indians contested in 40 state assembly seats. Where once there were only two MPs of Indian origin, there will now be 20 ethnic Indian legislators.
One of them is M Manoharan, one of the five Hindraf leaders detained under the draconian Internal Security Act. Manoharan won an assembly constituency in Selangor state on the DAP ticket.
“The election result holds two important lessons for the BN government,” says Kabilan. “First, it can no longer push through its Islamisation agenda, including temple demolitions. Second, it must review it policy of race-based representation in government and not just rely on the MIC to represent Indians.” Any way you look at it, Saturday’s election marks a decisive assertion of the political identity of the ethnic Indian community in Malaysia.
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