KKB polls: Indians and the futility of voting By Commander S THAYAPARAN (Retired) Royal Malaysian Navy

Malaysiakini : “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” - Martin Luther King Jr

COMMENT | If you want to understand why it really does not matter if Indians vote or who they vote for in the upcoming Kuala Kubu Baharu by-election, look no further than at Selangor exco V Papparaidu, who used bureaucratic legerdemain to placate the grievances of Indian estate workers from five plantations around Hulu Selangor.

If these were different people backed by economic and electoral power the response would have been much different. With these people, the road is long. It’s normally a party like PSM, which does not get votes but does the hard work, that sticks around.

For example, PSM settled the housing issue of 393 families from four estates in Dengkil.

“The houses are expected to be completed in October. BN and Pakatan Harapan had a hand in the project but it was PSM and its movement that helped bring the matter to their attention and demand action,” PSM stalwart S Arutchelvan said in 2023.

This is just one example of the sometimes decades-long struggles that PSM has been involved with but as Arutchelvan said: “We nominated a candidate in Dengkil and they are surprised to know that we are a political party.

MS : The plight of displaced Indians, left to fend for themselves after losing the security and succor of the plantations they toiled in will continue.

Just as it has in the past. For Malay supremacists like Anwar, they are invisible for most of the time except during elections when they magically emerge from the fog of forgetfulness to be entertained with a Tamil song or jig before receding into the background.

Rayer knows this as much as Ramasamy but his principles blunted by the DAP do not allow him to do or say anything. Ramasamy, on the other hand, who has been consistent as a prickly thorn in the side of his erstwhile party, and now free of its suffocating embrace, has made his case for doing what the late Haris Ibrahim started - Anything but UMNO of which Harapan is a miserable and useless appendage.

Boycotting Madani and its manipulators should be as legitimate as that other boycott of KK Mart and MacDonalds approved by Anwar and his fawning enablers. Any difference in the stench between PN manure and the bullcrap of UMNO’s Harapan?

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