COMMENT | George Town Festival video: Were Malays really excluded?

COMMENT | The gaffe by the George Town Festival (GTF) 2024’s organiser to exclude the Malay community in its promotional video may have offended some Malays, but there are two points to consider.

First, the Malays may not have been excluded. Second, the video is a reflection of our divided nation.

Like many Malaysians, we sometimes conflate the two - Indian and Muslim - and wrongly refer to the Indian Muslim as Malay. He speaks Malay, worships Allah, has a Malay name and maybe more tanned than most Malays; but is he ethnically Malay?

The highest concentration of Indian Muslims in Malaysia is Penang, with many Indian Muslims allegedly facing an identity crisis, asking, "Am I Indian or Malay?"

Some Indian Muslims prefer to align themselves with their Indian ethnicity. In some Umno-Baru branches in Penang, meetings are conducted in Tamil.

If they marry Malays, many switch ethnicities to Malay, for their offspring to enjoy the socio-economic and educational benefits.

Perhaps the organisers hadn’t overlooked the Malay element in their videos.