Date:27/11/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/11/27/stories/2007112761211300.htm

International - India & World

Motivated campaign, says Malaysia

P. S. Suryanarayana

— Photo: AFP

JUBILATION: P.Uthaya Kumar (centre), Hindu Rights Action Force chairman, P. Waytha Moorty (right) and V. Ganapati Rao after being freed by a court in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.

SINGAPORE: Malaysian authorities have described Sunday’s protest rally by an activist forum of ethnic Indians, the Hindu Rights Action Force, as a politically motivated campaign against the multi-racial government.

In an unrelated development, three leaders of the Force were on Monday freed of the charges brought against them last Friday under the Sedition Act. The accused, identified as P. Uthaya Kumar, P. Waytha Moorty, and V. Ganapati Rao, were discharged by a Sessions Court judge at Klang, on the ground that the charges were “not very clear.” They were accused of making seditious remarks at a restaurant on November 16, and each of them pleaded not guilty. According to an official version, the accused were granted “a discharge not amounting to an acquittal.”

In a rare show of defiance by people belonging to the ethnic Indian minority, the forum mobilised several thousand protesters in support of its move to submit a petition to the British High Commission. The rally was banned under a pre-emptive court order, and police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse the crowds. Officials put the number of those arrested at over 130.

The petition was aimed at seeking the appointment of a counsel by the British Queen to represent the Hindu Rights Action Force in a $4-trillion law suit in London. The law suit was filed by this group against the British Government for having resorted to a colonial practice of transporting ethnic Indians to the Malaya peninsula to work on plantations there. This colonial practice, it was argued, was the original cause of the “discrimination” against ethnic Indians in today’s Malaysia.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, now touring Africa, said those who “abused the freedom” granted to them under the country’s laws, by organising this “illegal” rally, would not go unpunished.

He said: “If you want to submit a memorandum, there are other ways of doing it” than by holding an “illegal” rally.