UNAVOIDABLE RESULTS OF THE HULU SELANGOR BY-ELECTION – THE INDIANS TRUST THE MELAYU WITH THEIR FUTURE, LEAVING THE CHINESE LEFT TO BE ON THEIR OWN
…AND HOW THE VERNACULAR MANDARIN SCHOOLS LOSE THEIR INDEPENDENCE.
By Mansor Puteh
THE OFFERING OF THE THREE MILLION-RINGGIT GRANT BY THE GOVERNMENT TO A VERNACULAR MANDARIN SCHOOL IN HULU SELANGOR SERVES AS A WARNING TO THEIR COMMUNITY THAT THAT THEIR SCHOOLS ARE NOT INDEPENDENT ANYMORE.
THEY HAD TRIED TO REMAIN STOIC IN DEFIANCE BUT THEY COULD LAST TOO LONG BEFORE THEY FALTER AND NOW START TO BECOME BEGGARS.
THIS SHOULD BE A CAUSE OF WORRY FOR THEIR COMMUNITY WHICH MEANS THAT THEIR ECONOMIC HOLD IN THE COUNTRY MAY BE EXPERIENCING A DECLINE, OR ELSE THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO SUPPORT THEIR ‘INDEPENDENT’ SCHOOLING SYSTEM.
Worse, it is just the first step towards them surrendering their schools to merge into the national schooling system or the sekolah Melayu in the future the more the population of the Chinese shrink and the more the economy of the Melayu increases and expands.
Therefore it was not a coup by the vernacular mandarin school or their community, but a huge blow to their psyche and independence.
But one of the strangest outcomes of the recently held Hulu Selangor by-elections is how the Indian voters and public have moved away from trusting their future with their alliance with the Chinese creating unholy kingmakers, which alas has only benefited the Chinese and not the Indians.
And the Chinese voters in this constituency are mostly with vernacular Mandarin school background who seem to be living in a world of their own.
They are living in a state of denial for too long of having been fed with a lot of propaganda by their vernacular press and those in English which are controlled by their brethren who do not seem to want them to leave Hong Kong where they are stuck at. So everything about them is Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Hong Kong…
They have not come to the realization what Malaysia and the Melayu are.
That the economy of the country is slowly being eroded from them, but which is now slowly but surely going into the control of the Melayu.
They may have felt so, especially when they see the many Melayu traders operating their makeshift stalls beside and around all of them.
They can also feel it when their business had started to shrink as more and more Melayu customers started to go to the stores operated by their own kind and not to the ones they operate.
The Chinese in Hulu Selangor must also feel that their future as traders is bleak. But with not much education and not able to speak Melayu and English, they do not have social mobility like many of the other younger Chinese and Indians who do have that.
It’s got nothing to do with the Indians now wanting to return to the Malaysian Indian congress or MIC.
And where was Hindraf in this equation? Nowhere.
It was an unholy alliance and an unofficial one based on the wrong premise that a larger non-Melayu political defiance and resistance could pose a serious threat to the Melayu hold on the politics in the country, ganged up by the immigrant backgrounds of these two communities.
And the Indians can see for themselves, despite the exertions of many other non-Melayu social, cultural and political activists, how more and more Indians from India are willing to come to Malaysia to work even as illegal workers in the food stalls.
This is despite the fact that how some of them have alleged the Melayu majority and government had ‘systematically’ marginalized them for too long.
And many Chinese, too, should be aware of how many Chinese from Beijing especially who are willing to come to Malaysia to work as foot reflexologists and doing other things, because they are not able to get a decent job in their own country.
So who are the Indians and Chinese in Malaysia who charge that they have been subject to ‘institutional discrimination’ and were not able to progress when their brethren who had only recently come to the country are able to benefit from the country?
But alas, this ganging up did not serve the interests of the Indians as the Chinese deserted them and went on their economic quest to control the politics of the country, leaving most of the Indians, still in the same places as their ancestors were.
Most of them have seen how the Chinese had been using the Indians to add to their leftist leaning and gain a lot of advantage as kingmakers this way.
In this way, they were able to gain much from the Chinese right as well as the Chinese left, meaning, the Chinese parties in Barisan and the other Chinese parties in Pakatan, all of which aim to serve their own community only.
They had left the Indians in the lurch.
So the by-elections were when the Indians shown their contempt of the Chinese minority which they had ganged up to try and swing the results of the elections in the past.
But all this came to naught as the Chinese continued to ignore the plight of the Indians even after getting the support from them in almost all the elections that had been held till the last general one in March, 2008.
The Indians in Hulu Selangor had shown their bravery by ignoring the Chinese and came to town on their own by supporting Barisan which they see as the Melayu whom they can trust with their future.
This trend is set to continue as more and more Indians begin to finally realize that their future is in the hands of the Melayu and not in the hands of the Chinese whom they consider to be too self-centered to allow Indians into their psyche, other than to use them to win votes for their candidates.
And in fact, the Chinese did not vote for Pakatan, as it seemed to look like. They never had in mind of doing so.
They only did not vote for Barisan. And they wanted to see Barisan fulfill their election pledges of giving them alms which Barisan did, despite being given the boot by the Chinese voters in this state constituency.
This does not go down well with the other Chinese who are grateful and also with the Indians who are now able to see who the Chinese in Hulu Selangor are and how their education and community leaders are, being weak souls for having accepted the three million-ringgit grant offered by the federal government.
It is just a ploy to fool the Chinese leaders by not exactly saying that they are of a certain stripe, with no backbone by bending too far to the back to accommodate their narrow views of things and in the process allow the so-called independent Chinese schools to be further downgraded to become no more than DEPENDENT SCHOOLS.
And many will also want to see if as yet another step for such vernacular schools in Mandarin and Tamil to move towards being ultimately absorbed into the national schooling system of the ‘sekolah Melayu’.
This can happen the more such schools continue to demand financial support from the government, and aided by the diminishing population of their communities so that the economy of the country are not in the hands of the Chinese anymore but the Melayu.
Then the Chinese and Indian or more appropriately, the Tamil communities will be able to see more of the ‘usefulness’ of their vernacular schools that they had trusted too much in the past in the true light that they do not give their children much of a future in this new Malaysia that only serve the propaganda of the Chinese community leaders only.
And the giving of the three million ringgit grant by Najib to the vernacular Mandarin school in Rasa should be seen not as a coup for the Chinese education, but as a huge blow to their psyche. This is how low they are willing to stoop in order to get such funds.
And they are definitely not going to stop here. They will make more demands and get everything they want, while the still stick with the Left where they have no future of getting any assistance and support from.
So in the end, the younger Chinese who are in such vernacular schools and the Tamils who are in their own vernacular schools will be uncalculated the feelings of being indebted to the government and especially to the Melayu, too, and their future is not in the hands of their own community leaders who had already forsaken their ideals.
This is the real outcome of the by-elections of Hulu Selangor.
By Mansor Puteh
THE OFFERING OF THE THREE MILLION-RINGGIT GRANT BY THE GOVERNMENT TO A VERNACULAR MANDARIN SCHOOL IN HULU SELANGOR SERVES AS A WARNING TO THEIR COMMUNITY THAT THAT THEIR SCHOOLS ARE NOT INDEPENDENT ANYMORE.
THEY HAD TRIED TO REMAIN STOIC IN DEFIANCE BUT THEY COULD LAST TOO LONG BEFORE THEY FALTER AND NOW START TO BECOME BEGGARS.
THIS SHOULD BE A CAUSE OF WORRY FOR THEIR COMMUNITY WHICH MEANS THAT THEIR ECONOMIC HOLD IN THE COUNTRY MAY BE EXPERIENCING A DECLINE, OR ELSE THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO SUPPORT THEIR ‘INDEPENDENT’ SCHOOLING SYSTEM.
Worse, it is just the first step towards them surrendering their schools to merge into the national schooling system or the sekolah Melayu in the future the more the population of the Chinese shrink and the more the economy of the Melayu increases and expands.
Therefore it was not a coup by the vernacular mandarin school or their community, but a huge blow to their psyche and independence.
But one of the strangest outcomes of the recently held Hulu Selangor by-elections is how the Indian voters and public have moved away from trusting their future with their alliance with the Chinese creating unholy kingmakers, which alas has only benefited the Chinese and not the Indians.
And the Chinese voters in this constituency are mostly with vernacular Mandarin school background who seem to be living in a world of their own.
They are living in a state of denial for too long of having been fed with a lot of propaganda by their vernacular press and those in English which are controlled by their brethren who do not seem to want them to leave Hong Kong where they are stuck at. So everything about them is Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Hong Kong…
They have not come to the realization what Malaysia and the Melayu are.
That the economy of the country is slowly being eroded from them, but which is now slowly but surely going into the control of the Melayu.
They may have felt so, especially when they see the many Melayu traders operating their makeshift stalls beside and around all of them.
They can also feel it when their business had started to shrink as more and more Melayu customers started to go to the stores operated by their own kind and not to the ones they operate.
The Chinese in Hulu Selangor must also feel that their future as traders is bleak. But with not much education and not able to speak Melayu and English, they do not have social mobility like many of the other younger Chinese and Indians who do have that.
It’s got nothing to do with the Indians now wanting to return to the Malaysian Indian congress or MIC.
And where was Hindraf in this equation? Nowhere.
It was an unholy alliance and an unofficial one based on the wrong premise that a larger non-Melayu political defiance and resistance could pose a serious threat to the Melayu hold on the politics in the country, ganged up by the immigrant backgrounds of these two communities.
And the Indians can see for themselves, despite the exertions of many other non-Melayu social, cultural and political activists, how more and more Indians from India are willing to come to Malaysia to work even as illegal workers in the food stalls.
This is despite the fact that how some of them have alleged the Melayu majority and government had ‘systematically’ marginalized them for too long.
And many Chinese, too, should be aware of how many Chinese from Beijing especially who are willing to come to Malaysia to work as foot reflexologists and doing other things, because they are not able to get a decent job in their own country.
So who are the Indians and Chinese in Malaysia who charge that they have been subject to ‘institutional discrimination’ and were not able to progress when their brethren who had only recently come to the country are able to benefit from the country?
But alas, this ganging up did not serve the interests of the Indians as the Chinese deserted them and went on their economic quest to control the politics of the country, leaving most of the Indians, still in the same places as their ancestors were.
Most of them have seen how the Chinese had been using the Indians to add to their leftist leaning and gain a lot of advantage as kingmakers this way.
In this way, they were able to gain much from the Chinese right as well as the Chinese left, meaning, the Chinese parties in Barisan and the other Chinese parties in Pakatan, all of which aim to serve their own community only.
They had left the Indians in the lurch.
So the by-elections were when the Indians shown their contempt of the Chinese minority which they had ganged up to try and swing the results of the elections in the past.
But all this came to naught as the Chinese continued to ignore the plight of the Indians even after getting the support from them in almost all the elections that had been held till the last general one in March, 2008.
The Indians in Hulu Selangor had shown their bravery by ignoring the Chinese and came to town on their own by supporting Barisan which they see as the Melayu whom they can trust with their future.
This trend is set to continue as more and more Indians begin to finally realize that their future is in the hands of the Melayu and not in the hands of the Chinese whom they consider to be too self-centered to allow Indians into their psyche, other than to use them to win votes for their candidates.
And in fact, the Chinese did not vote for Pakatan, as it seemed to look like. They never had in mind of doing so.
They only did not vote for Barisan. And they wanted to see Barisan fulfill their election pledges of giving them alms which Barisan did, despite being given the boot by the Chinese voters in this state constituency.
This does not go down well with the other Chinese who are grateful and also with the Indians who are now able to see who the Chinese in Hulu Selangor are and how their education and community leaders are, being weak souls for having accepted the three million-ringgit grant offered by the federal government.
It is just a ploy to fool the Chinese leaders by not exactly saying that they are of a certain stripe, with no backbone by bending too far to the back to accommodate their narrow views of things and in the process allow the so-called independent Chinese schools to be further downgraded to become no more than DEPENDENT SCHOOLS.
And many will also want to see if as yet another step for such vernacular schools in Mandarin and Tamil to move towards being ultimately absorbed into the national schooling system of the ‘sekolah Melayu’.
This can happen the more such schools continue to demand financial support from the government, and aided by the diminishing population of their communities so that the economy of the country are not in the hands of the Chinese anymore but the Melayu.
Then the Chinese and Indian or more appropriately, the Tamil communities will be able to see more of the ‘usefulness’ of their vernacular schools that they had trusted too much in the past in the true light that they do not give their children much of a future in this new Malaysia that only serve the propaganda of the Chinese community leaders only.
And the giving of the three million ringgit grant by Najib to the vernacular Mandarin school in Rasa should be seen not as a coup for the Chinese education, but as a huge blow to their psyche. This is how low they are willing to stoop in order to get such funds.
And they are definitely not going to stop here. They will make more demands and get everything they want, while the still stick with the Left where they have no future of getting any assistance and support from.
So in the end, the younger Chinese who are in such vernacular schools and the Tamils who are in their own vernacular schools will be uncalculated the feelings of being indebted to the government and especially to the Melayu, too, and their future is not in the hands of their own community leaders who had already forsaken their ideals.
This is the real outcome of the by-elections of Hulu Selangor.
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