LETTER | Saravanan's outburst misplaced

LETTER | The strict standard operating procedures (SOPs) at the recent Thaipusam Hindu religious festival in Batu Caves have received flak from Human Resources Minister M Saravanan, who claimed that the Indians were unhappy with the way the government handled the situation.

The sudden outburst, however, is rather too little, too late for him to win the hearts of the Indian community, whose support for BN, Perikatan Nasional and the MIC is continuously decaying, especially after the explosive revelation of MIC's take on the Mitra funds allocated to the Indian community for the benefit of the B40 and M40 groups. MIC should not have touched the funds.

Saravanan should focus on addressing several issues that, for years, have been begging for solutions instead of championing the issue of the SOPs for Thaipusam, which was just a one-day affair.

Slogans like 1Malaysia, Peoples’ Government, Malay-Muslim Government and Keluarga Malaysia all did very little to get to the right minds of the non-Malays and moderate Malays alike.

MIC and Keluarga Malaysia should address Indian and non-Malay issues, such as:

1. Balancing the non-Malays proportion in the civil service and GLCs;

2. Allocating fair opportunities in businesses and issuing permits, licences and contracts, etc;

3. Addressing the stateless Malaysians born in this country;

4. Offering fair scholarships, allocation and places in public universities based on merit;

5. Ridding any form of racial discrimination and uniting the people as one Malaysian family as enshrined in the Constitution;

6. Maintaining a moderate climate of religious affairs that does not put fear in non-Malays and providing confidence to attract investors; and

7. Giving fair and just allocation from the national budget to the non-Malays. It is totally unjust and unfair to allocate RM145 million to the entire Indian community and RM11.5 billion to the Malays.

MIC did well in producing an Indian blueprint. It was mentioned somewhere that it will be tabled in Parliament.

Hopefully, this will not come to the point where the Indian community must vote for BN to be in the government first in order for the policies to be implemented.

P SIVAKUMAR is the president of Johor Indian Business Association (Jiba).

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.