WHEN THE GOING IS GOOD, shoot yourself in the foot. This is how most Malaysian political parties conduct their affairs. They would do anything to show how immature or stupid they are, given the slightest chance. The Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) is more prone to this than any other. When it should conduct itself as a responsible party, it now shows it cannot. The Indian Progressive Front (IPF), which does not know any better, and proves it. The MIC president, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, kicked up a storm with a claim that the IPF president, Dato' M.G. Pandithan, falsely claimed the editorial adviser of a Tamil newspaper opposed to the MIC president, Mr K.P. Athimulam - better known as Athi Kumanan - was an IPF deputy president. It appears he is not: he told the press he is thinking about it. Be that as it may, Dato' Seri Samy alleges this is how he got his award.

The MIC organises a convention of MIC branch chairman in Shah Alam yesterday (09 November 2003) ostensibly to prepare the MIC for the general election. Twelve thousand attended, which if its president is believed, is the largest gathering of Indians in one place. It should earn a place in the Malaysian Indian book of records. But in his speech, he could not contain himself about threats to his position. He singled out the Indian Progressive Party (IPF) president, Dato' M.G. Pandithan, for nominating an editor of a Tamil newspaper opposed to Dato' Seri Samy Vellu for an award from the King. And committed a faux pas. He should not have brought His Majesty's name into a political dispute, which is what it is. The award is given only after careful vetting in the Prime Minister's Department and the Palace. Dato' Seri Samy Vellu would have been shown the list before the Prime Minister forwarded the recommendations. Why did he not object then? Or is he telling us even Dr Mahathir did not, in the end, extend him the courtesy he did have in the past?

THE MALAYSIAN INDIAN CONGRESS PRESIDENT, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, at the start of his self-delusional three decades in office which he insists he deserves, is quick to snap at anyone who dares to suggest he overstays his welcome after 24 years in office. That the new National Front (BN) president, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, would rather have some one other than him in his cabinet is ignored. If he is MIC president, he is the MIC cabinet minister. As MIC president, he would not act if Indians are deliberately shunted aside to such a degree that they are the underclass of 21st century Malaysia. Nor if Indians are denied places they deserve at Malaysian universities. Nor if they are deliberately humiliated. Nor even if Indians, by the MIC's insistence that they be taught in Tamil, makes them unfit for the modern world. He says he would deal with them. If any dare suggest that he does not, or wrongly, and he goes into a fearful tantrum.

If ours is not a reading society, it could never be one where literature and literary works are honoured. Indeed, there is no body of literature in English here - let us forget about world standards here - as there is, for instance, in the Indian sub-continent. But there is a vibrance unheard of, and ignored, by the mainstream Malaysian society, in the literary writings in Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The Sin Chew Jit Poh awards for Chinese literary works is among the best, if not the best, in the Chinese-speaking world. But who in the mainstream has heard of them? It is political necessity of promoting Malay as an important regional language that gives pride of place to Malay literary works. But it still does not compare, bar a few exceptions, with Tamil writing.

Despite it, more take to it, and are happy with it. One man, an Indian, would not opt for this service, worried he would not get the hopelessly third-rate Vaanavil Indian channel. until he realised he could have the pick of all satellite programmes in India. A Malayali gets the pick of Malayalam films and programmes in Kerala. As of other Indian language groups that are deliberately ignored for Tamil here. A Frenchman who wanted the pick of European programmes now watches his French programmes in his sitting room in Kuala Lumpur.

But what does India expect of its diaspora? The Indian foreign minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, wants it to emulate the Jewish diaspora by uniting and working for a common goal. He chose the wrong example. It was the diaspora which created the Jewish state, and which keeps it afloat. So the unity and common goal is dictated by the diaspora. He does not mention how the Sikh diaspora kept New Delhi in knots while it fueled the Khalistan movement in the Punjab. Nor of how Sri Lankan Tamils from the diaspora fought to ensure a Tamil Eelam.

"But we find that the people who run the schools have other ideas," citing as one example the refusal to have classes in Tamil and Mandarin in national schools. Islamic practices had been introduced so the non-Malay and non-Muslim is alienated. "For example, before, we had no problems with girls wearing shirts and boys wearing shorts, especially for games. Now boys are forbidden from wearing shorts, even for playing games, and even games are discouraged,"

When one side decides civilians from the enemy is far game, one should not be surprised if the enemy pays back in the same coin. If the terrorists are as brutal and cavalier, those they target are no less brutal and cavalier. So, when Washington, and now Australia, decides it will strike its neighbours at will for harbouring terrorists and terrorist gangs, with Mr Howard making the horrifying suggestion the UN Charter be amended to allow it, all it guarantees is more terror in retaliation. For Washington and its satraps look upon terror they now fight as a well-organised irregular movement, when in reality they are so different in outlook or aims, and are linked not to a global idea but for their local agendas. However brilliant and murderous the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, it has nothing in common with this global war on terror. Nor the guerrillas of Kashmir. Nor even the Talibans in Afghanistan. But an effort is made to link them, and there is where it all comes unstuck. The Bali and Mombassa bombings were quickly blamed on Mr Osama bin Laden, but up to now, only suppositions and the questionable deductions of anti-terror experts are the only proof we have.

If you go by the rantings of the National Front (BN) court jester and buffoon-in-chief, the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia and the Malaysian Indian Congress had better beware. The president of the forgettable PPP, Dato' M. Kayveas, is on the warpath -- and after their parliamentary and state assembly representation. He wants their parliamentary and state seats. No less. At its 49th annual general meeting on Sunday (06 Oct '02), he made three impossible demands: 21 seats in Parliament and 32 in the state assemblies; compulsory study in schools of Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English as the first step towards a united Bangsa Malaysia.

The is how the National Front (BN), in power since 1955, looks upon what it set out to be. In the intervening years, the idea of a multiracial society is reduced to a token: there to prove an ideal whilst the idea itself is shot to pieces. It has in time come to mean, to those who say it and to those it is addressed to, a fiction. When the non-Malay challenges his degraded status, he is warned he strays on seditious ground or worse, or told to enjoy his democratic rights from whence his ancestors came from. The Malaysian is told the sky is the limit but only, in Government, if he fulfills the unmentioned requirement of being a Muslim or converting to it. Indian and Chinese officers are told he could go high if only he would convert. The Chinese, on the other hand, restrict the non-Chinese into his midst by insisting on Mandarin or one of the Chinese dialects as a prerequirement. Little attention is paid to the Indian for if he insists on learning only Tamil, he ends up a drainsweeper or rubber tapper.

Thirty years later, it is a political problem. The armed forces, and the police, is almost wholly Malay, as is the civil service. The promised fairplay for the non-Malay is a pipe dream. A quote is in place. It began, oddly enough in the education service. When the last expatriate, an advisor to the service, retired under the Malaysianisation scheme in 1965, UMNO and the Malay officers insisted that his successor ought to be a Malay, not the one next in line, a Jaffna Tamil. Tun Hamdan Sheikh Tahir, as he is known now, was way down the pecking order, but he was picked to succeed the retiring expatriate. The man who should have been just withdrew into his shell, and stayed on until his retirement a few years later. That became the norm. After the 1969 riots, it was official policy that the non-Malay be put in his place. Their roles in the heirarchy is a token, only or two Indians and Chinese allowed into the upper reaches. I know of some many civil servants and armed forces officers who were assistants to those they had trained when they joined.

POLITICS | AIMST or Tamil Schools? Posted on Saturday, August 24 @ 20:53:00 EDT by eS

Malaysia's super-efficient, all-knowing, all-seeing Cabinet decrees, without the usual unaccustomed thought and consideration, that English be introduced into the curriculum. The UMNO supreme council would have none of it, when the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, appraised it of it. You may teach science and mathematics, it told him, in English. No more no less. Since it is more important than the Cabinet, he immediately amends the policy and runs into a political storm. The Malay, Chinese and Tamils schools do not want it. It was originally for the national (Malay) schools, and extended to the national-type (Chinese and Tamil) schools. The government could not face the flak, and threatened to detain without trial those who opposed the policy. Then cracks appeared in the government's own ranks. The Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (Gerakan) both had doubts, one prepared to disuss it the other outrightly rejecting it. It is self-evident now the National Front government's component partners were not consulted.

Especially since the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, now warns groups opposing English not to politicise it. "There is no need for any quarters to hold demonstrations ... the matter should not be politicised," he thunders. Dr Mahathir understands the situation well, the intention is good, there may be problems in implementing it in primary schools, and warned those who spread rumours that this is tantamount to closing down Chinese and Tamil schools would be charged with sedition. He diverts attention to say the government would not, when every reform the national education system has been in the past willy nilly narrows the options for the Chinese and Tamil schools.

Similar concerns exist amongst Tamil schools. They are convinced -- the government has not disabused them of it -- that aim of all these policies is to ensure the disappearance of the non-Malay languages as media of instruction.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, wants English back to be what it was before he, when education minister, in self-interest and playing to the gallery, scuttled it. It was deliberate then. Now, it is to satisfy a whim. For if English is to return to the reasonable fluency of the 1970s, and the government spends more money than it can afford, and the policy well thought out, it would take, perhaps, a generation before it could. Nothing announced of the policy so far suggests this. It is introduced in haste, without discussion, and forcefed. As opposition grew, amongst the Malay, Indian, Chinese communities, the threat of detention under the Internal Security Act made it unworkable. When the government alters the national education system, it is always to reduce the influence of other teaching languages, Mandarin and Tamil. Why should this be any different? Which is why any change in the system is fraught with the opposition now extant in the teaching of English in Chinese and Tamil schools. This time, the government has managed to annoy the Malay cultural ground as well.

THE MALAYSIAN Tamil MONTHLY, Semparuti (Hibiscus), in June asked critical questions about the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC)'s proposed Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (AIMST) in Kedah. It wondered whether MIC could proceed with AMIST if fundamental student grievances -- untrained lecturers, indifferent management, poor or no facilities, over regimentation, refusal to resolve grievances -- in another institute it owns and runs, Tafe College in Seremban, remains un-addressed. The reports hit a raw nerve.

And because the teaching of English is seen in political terms, and the maintenance of Malay in cultural terms, all this policy threatens is to divide the Malay community even further. As I have argued earlier, the government should have strengthened the Malay cultural view with making English an important element in that view, in which English and Malay could co-exist but with the Malay confident of his heritage and not threatened because he knows or, as now, does not know English. The Prime Minister envisions English to dominate, as in Singapore, with Malay and the other languages taking a less important role. In 40 years of that policy in the republic, the cultural ground opts for a patois of English intermixed with Chinese, Malay and Tamil which official Singapore finds objectionable but which has taken root in its culture. That is what would happen if English is introduced here in this fashion. It is better to use English as in India where it is one of the official languages, the language of government and commerce, and all developing into languages in their own right that Indian English is not the Queen's English but is, if not more, vibrant than its parent.

Instead, the problems were discussed without a worldview. Tamil education is, would remain, a mess if it is not taught with Malay. At present, it remains a passport to Indian underclass. Just because a few with Tamil education escape this trap, it doesn?t mean ipso facto it is a great success. For a Tamil school dropout with a basic knowledge in Tamil and little else, gangsterism is a career option; some of them who took this route, had frog jumped into the middle class, politics, parliament, state assembly, and into the government. It is a sad reflection of Indian society that many gangsters should have reached respectability as those who rose up by their own effort. Nothing I saw at this conference (or in MIC's aims, for that matter) addresses this phenomenon.

One sees examples of this in every day life. I spend 90 per cent of my time in the English language. I read, write and speak it with reasonable competence. It brings bread to my table. But Malayalam, my mother tongue, -- not English -- makes me what I am. I do not speak it as often as I should, nor read and write it with the fluency I would like. I dream in it more than in English. I also speak Tamil, write it better than Malayalam, but I do not fit into the Tamil milleau in Tamil Nadu as I do in Kerala. Tamil is a language I studied, like English, but I am not comfortable with it. I speak and read Malay but it does not impinge on my consciousness as it should. I am from an older, independence, generation whose cultural roots lay in distant lands even if our citizenship did not.

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