The Hindu : Move on

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 14, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Move on

AN UNFORTUNATE EPISODE of obvious police high-handedness against Indian software professionals is threatening to cast a shadow over the relations between India and Malaysia, the South East Asian tiger. New Delhi and IT industry spokesmen have conveyed their anger in full measure and Malaysia's response has so far been lukewarm. There is no reason to suspect that the authorities will not investigate the matter thoroughly. A visiting Malaysian Minister has expressed regret. But, an apology from Kuala Lumpur is in order besides suitable recompense to the victims of the official excesses. If complaints that the visa papers and passports of some of the Indians had been tampered with are found to be valid, there will be ground for initiating stringent action against the officials responsible. The incident comes at a time when the bilateral ties have begun to emerge from the shadows of decades of mutual neglect and are set to flourish, founded on the firm base of technological cooperation. The Narasimha Rao Government with its Look-East policy ended the decades of drought and the Vajpayee Government has been intensifying the effort to renew the country's ancient links with Malaysia and others in the region. Exchange of visits at the highest political level had helped cement the trend toward closer cooperation. The row over the latest incident has injected a sour note.

While it will be self-defeating to dismiss what happened on Sunday in the Malaysian capital, during which Malaysian police behaved in an unacceptably uncivilised manner, as an isolated incident, New Delhi must ensure that it does not overreact and allow it to cloud bilateral ties. Certainly avoidable, it was the result of bureaucratic overstepping by immigration and security officials. In the downsized democracy that Mahathir Mohammed has permitted in his country, such high-handedness by an overzealous bureaucracy is an inevitable consequence and must be a daily phenomenon. In the context of the "sons of the soil" policy of positive discrimination pioneered by Dr. Mahathir in response to domestic compulsions, the national effort to tackle the serious problem of illegal immigration has been accompanied by a degree of aggressiveness and even insensitivity. The country launched an amnesty scheme and announced a deportation policy during the summer last year to evict illegal immigrant workers who had been useful as cheap labour for Malaysia's building and road construction industries. Indian immigrant labour, semi-skilled and unskilled, were by no means the only victims of this proactive approach. Indonesian labourers bore the brunt of the fury of the Malaysian deportation squads.

The latest victims of such brazen behaviour belong, however, to a different category. The highly skilled, highly sought IT professionals who were roughed up by mindless policemen and who were denied access to the Indian High Commissioner were in Malaysia at the invitation of the host Government to help the nation leapfrog on the IT track. The IT factor is an excellent example of cooperation between two developing nations and deserved better than the treatment that the Malaysian police and immigration officials meted out to the skilled foreign labour on its soil. Malaysia, alone among the ASEAN seven sisters known for its prickly behaviour, was also the first in the grouping to demonstrate enterprise and entrepreneurial interest in expanding trade and commercial ties. As head of the Non-Aligned Movement, a special responsibility devolves on Dr. Mahathir to ensure that nothing is done to hamper South-South cooperation, particularly at this critical juncture in globalisation of trade. As for New Delhi, statements such as the one that the Foreign Office spokesman made on Tuesday in which he declared that "it cannot be business as usual with Malaysia", have hardly any place in today's world. Having registered its strong protest at the treatment of its IT professionals, New Delhi must now move on.

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