Malaysian Indians…why can’t we be united
I don’t understand this simple matter….We’re indians in malaysia…..Whether you’re ceylonese, malayalees, Tamilians, Telugu, Punjabis, Sikhs, Sindhis or any other group from the sub continent…why are we so adverse with each other….Okay maybe not all of us…but unfortunately the minority who promote ethnic superiority are the one trumpeting defeaningly and not the silent majority…why..why..why…
Got this from the star….Shucks…People…let’s get together…Indians in malaysia…let’s work together and be successful…why are some people more worried overly worried about their heritage and not working together….We’re not in India…and trust…me it’s better being malaysian indians…
Standing up for the Ceylonese
SMALL and marginalised but educated and enterprising, Malaysians of Ceylonese Tamil descent do not know their actual numbers because they are lumped together under the grey label of “others”.
Mainly from Jaffna and Trincomalee, they were brought in by the British in the 1920s and 1930s as administrators to Malaya’s rubber estates and railroads. And they worked hard.
As their numbers grew, one M.W. Navaratnam, a civil servant, founded the Malaysian Ceylonese Congress in 1958.
Today’s Malaysian Ceylonese are highly literate, have a strong command of English and gravitate easily to the professions. Medicine, law and engineering are favourites.
The luminaries, most prominently Westport executive chairman Tan Sri G. Gnanalingam – another is the reclusive tycoon T. Ananda Krishnan – are ever grateful to their parents for having given them a good education.
But where Ceylonese used to occupy 10% of the seats in university, today they are relegated to only 1% or 2%, said newly elected Congress president Datuk Dr N.K.S. Tharmaseelan.
“The educational opportunities are there but not given to us. Instead our students are given ‘junk courses’ in the humanities, or political sciences. When they graduate, they cannot get jobs,” he added.
Outside the community, few Malaysians recognise the difference between Indians and Ceylonese. So in the 2000 census, many a time Ceylonese were counted as Indians.
For this very reason, the MIC has invited the Ceylonese to join up, as the problems faced by the two communities are somewhat similar.
The Ceylonese, however, declined, feeling that “every race wanted its own identity to survive, said Tharmaseelan.
“We are not a superior race. We just don’t want to be the first of the lost race of Malaysia.
“We were born Ceylonese, so we want to pass on our culture and language to our children.”
Unspoken, perhaps, is that education had given the Ceylonese a slight edge over the Indian coolies.
It was the MIC leaders who did not want the better-educated Ceylonese to take over the party, countered lawyer Datuk Param Cumaraswamy, current president of the Malaysian chapter of Transparency International.
Still, the Ceylonese Congress has always supported Barisan Nasional, even if it was never formalised as a political party.
The Ceylonese once basked in the political limelight.
“After Navaratnam, senator Tan Sri C. Sinnadurai represented us into the 1970s,” said Tharmaseelan.
The Ceylonese miss their glory days. Their wish list:
·to participate at least as a dialogue partner (with Barisan Nasional);
·to regain one senator’s post, to start with;
·to have qualified and able Ceylonese run for Parliament;
l to set up a Council of Minority Affairs in the Prime Minister’s office.
To this end, Tharmaseelan and his team are aggressively recruiting new members, aiming to treble or quadruple the present 3,000.
He is also inviting donations for a building fund, because while they have built several temples and ashram, they have never built something for themselves. (Donors may phone 06-647 7588/ 06-799 5880/012-6802803.)
Other efforts to pull the community up by its bootstraps include introducing Tamil literacy for adults, while encouraging the youths, who are already fluent in English and Malay, to speak Tamil at home.
Meanwhile, a minority of Malaysians of Ceylonese descent are sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers “back home”. Individually, some have sent money for hospitals, schools, to help flood victims and to provide food.
The Ceylonese do, however, scratch among themselves, as they do with Tamils of Indian descent.
“They can never be united,” said Cumaraswamy in disgust. “It’s the crab mentality. They just cannot see another do well.”
The lack of cooperation between Ceylonese and Indian Tamils was painfully evident when they tried to repair the Scott Road Temple and the Mariamman Temple downtown.
For as long as the Ceylonese Tamils do not stop bickering among themselves, they have little chance of putting up a united front to the government.
And these are crucial times. As all the other community leaders are fighting for allocations under the Ninth Malaysia Plan, “by putting us under others, we will lose out on quotas, business, education grants, funds,” said Tharmaseelan.
“We don’t want to be the last of the Mohicans,” he said.
As a minority among minorities, their greatest fear is that they may one day just drift into oblivion. - By SUHAINI AZNAM
