Peaceful protesters marched with candles in downtown Kuala Lumpur to exercise their right to march peacefully. The Malaysian government sent in riot police and water cannons to exercise its right to intimidate peaceful protesters.

HINDRAF, the Hindu Rights Action Force, a political and cultural organization serving the sizable Indian community here, was one of the march’s participants. In November, HINDRAF had organized a rally that drew at least 10,000 (the number is disputed) Indians protesting the government’s Malay-first policies in education and government hiring, the destruction of temples, and the increasing anti-Indian chauvinism among the Malay. The protesters were met with batons, tear gas, and water cannons. Five of HINDRAF’s leaders were detained as terrorists under the Internal Security Act (with alleged links to the RSS and the LTTE). Some fifty more protesters were arrested. A few were released, while others will stand trial for various incitement and disorderly conduct charges.

Tonight’s candlelight procession was simply to remind the government that people have the right to assemble and to express their concerns legally and peacefully in public. The silent march occurred without incident and was effectively over, with only small groups of protesters lingering to talk after the streets had been reopened, when the riot police arrived. People who had left the area returned; photographers made their way back to the scene, and everyone knew what was coming, as in Chekhov’s famous dictum about not introducing a gun in a play unless you intend to fire it.

In the end, though, all of this was for show. There was almost no one left to disperse when the cannon came up. The real action came from the unarmed police in yellow vests who charged after the stragglers in an angry show of personal force. This was really the point—Malaysian riot police running down Indian protesters, breaking up the crowd, restoring order to an otherwise quiet night in the monsoon drizzle.

More photos below. Continue reading →

I had a moment of Obama-identification when I saw the following anecdote from the Iowa caucuses in the New York Times last night:

The Boyd household, perhaps, is atypical. She supported Mr. Obama, while her husband, Rex, walked into the caucus as a Clinton supporter. Before the final headcount was conducted, she said, he changed his mind and moved over to the Obama corner of the room.

In an overnight e-mail, she offered an explanation. “Rex went to Clinton and I wore a Obama sticker. As people milled and talked, he changed before the count as he heard people stating they could not vote for someone with a last name like Obama. One said, ‘He needs to stay in Chicago and take care of his family.’

“Rex came over to Obama, where he heard not one negative bit of talk. He felt they both stand for pretty much the same ideas, but our leader needs to be positive and Obama puts that feeling out there. That is important in this world.” (link)

There goes that ‘funny’ name again. Obama has joked about it at times in his stump speeches, but here it seems like it might really be a liability for him after all. For someone to say “I couldn’t vote for someone named Obama” is to my eye code: it’s a way of saying “I couldn’t vote for someone foreign.”

The problem of the funny name, and the association it carries with foreignness, as we’ve discussed many MANY times here at Sepia Mutiny, is a characteristic most South Asians share with Mr. Barack Obama. (He has a nickname, by the way — “Barry” — though he has admirably chosen not to campaign on it… yet).

This anecdote is a little reminder that this campaign is still, in some sense, a referendum on race and, more broadly, “difference.” Clearly, some voters (even supposedly less race-minded Democrats) really aren’t ready for a black candidate, or a “different” candidate — but as, in the anecdote above, there are also voters who are drawn to Obama for precisely the reason that others are prejudiced against him.

Obama’s difference obviously isn’t exactly the same as that which many of us contend with, of course: he’s Christian, and many of us are not (though it’s worth pointing out again that he doesn’t have a Christian name). He’s also visually and culturally identifiable to most Americans as “black,” while Desis often have the problem of looking merely foreign and unplaceable (In his second gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as we’ve discussed, found a formula to get around this, but since it entailed positioning himself in some cases against the interests of African Americans, I don’t think it’s a formula I would encourage others to emulate.) Continue reading →

JAN. 2, SINGAPORE, JERVOIS ROAD—When I met him, Seelan Palay was reading a Tamil newspaper. He had not eaten in two and half days, had not had solid food in ten, and had not consumed more than one meal for seventeen. A third-generation Singaporean Tamil, Palay had whittled down his caloric intake gradually in preparation for a hunger strike. In time-honored South Asian tradition, the scruffy 23-year-old art school graduate was fasting in front of the Malaysian High Commission to protest government actions: in this case, neighboring Malaysia’s violent response to a peaceful rally of thousands of ethnic Indians at the end of November.

The November event, conducted under the umbrella of Malaysia’s Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF), has mobilized Palay even in Singapore, where restrictions on freedom of expression are par for the course. The grandson of a South Indian gardener and a gravedigger from northern Sri Lanka, Palay is an old hand at causing a stir. Palay, a painter and video artist, attended the rally in Kuala Lumpur, and says that what he saw there—as Indians peacefully protested the Malaysian government’s treatment of their minority—moved him to action. (Some reports, including one from major Malaysian news source Malaysiakini, put the numbers of that rally as high as 30,000. Other sources say 10,000 attended. Palay was there in part to document the action.) Malaysian police met those rallying with tear gas and water cannons. Palay says he was among those tear-gassed. The government has detained five of the group’s leaders under the Internal Security Act, which gives officials broad powers and has little transparency. Palay says each day of his hunger fast is for one of the detainees. He’s petitioning for them to be released, charged and tried in an open and transparent way. At this point, the Malaysian government has offered no answer.

“Everyone deserves a fair trial,” he says. “It’s very unfair. These people are not even asking for a change of government. They’re asking for a change of policy…. That kind of response was just uncalled for.”

photo by Preston Merchant Continue reading →