One can have an idea of acute pain, which the Indian Ethnic community in Malaysia has been bearing for a long period of time from this excerpt of a letter: We refer to the above critical matters in Malaysia but which generally gets the least attention locally even by the Opposition parties, NGO’s, the Malaysian Human Rights Commission and the media for this community is generally regarded as politically insignificant, do not draw local or international funding and are deemed not press worthy. To the contrary the Malaysian government has successfully projected itself to the world as a modern Islamic thinking country, which is not true. 

Photo: The leader of Malaysia's Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), P. Uthayakumar (L), and his colleagues are carried by supporters along a street in Klang town outside Kuala Lumpur in this November 26, 2007 file photo. Uthayakumar, 46, who helped organise 10,000 ethnic Indians to protest against racial discrimination, said on Wednesday he feared he might be jailed for years without trial for speaking up.

This letter was written to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by Hindu Rights Action force (HINDRAF) Legal Advisor Mr. P. Uthayakumar. One may wonder why this letter was written to British Prime Minister. The answer is because the ethnic minority Indians in Malaysia was brought into Malaysia by the British some 200 over years ago. Since independence in 1957, the Malaysian Indians have been a part of Malaysian community. But we must not forget that Malaysia is an Islamic nation.   

The issue of the arrest of 24 HINDRAF members and the consequent developments can’t be viewed as a simple issue. On the one hand, the Malaysian Government’s inadequacy of not only the absence of appropriate laws to deal with such a situation but also of the power that it should have had resting with the police under the Police Act rendering it helpless and the underlying fear of the Ethnic Indians’ movement gathering momentum over a period of time following the impressive and unprecedented demonstration of a gathering comprising 20,000 people. On the other hand the genuine concern of the ethnic Indians suffering on account of indifference shown to them over a long period have complicated matters so much that no solution can be visualized in the near future.

Right now the Malaysian Government is in a jam. It finds itself unprepared to deal with the situation not only to the satisfaction of the Malaysian Ethnic Indians but also to the India and other Common Wealth countries so much so that