I refer to the letter Indians should stop their whining and would like to assure the writer that the Indians he refers to also include Malayalees like me and the Sikhs, Gujaratis, Sindhis, Punjabis and Goanese - and which not only include Hindus, but also Christians, Buddhists and Muslims.

Let me also assure him that we Indians are not whining, but asking for rights which are also ours as citizens of this country. The majority of the Indians are Tamils whose parents or grandparents came to the then Federated Malay States as indentured labour.

The Malayalees, and the other Indians you refer to, came to this country to join the civil service or to do conduct business. And yes, we have been collectively discriminated as Indians. The parents of most of the doctors and lawyers had to struggle hard to sent their children for higher education.

My parents spent their hard earned money to give me an education and I had to spend my hard earned money to educate my children. and am thus still working well into my ‘golden years’. Are you telling me that we Indians should always have to help ourselves, while the government will take care of only a privileged class of people?

What do you expect poor Indians to do when the estates were de-fragmented and sold to private developers? Their livelihoods, their homes, their very future were taken away from them. Does not the government of the day have a moral duty to take care of its citizens?

If all citizens should ‘take care of themselves’, then we do not need a government. Otherwise, it has to be a government by the people, of the people, for the people and that includes Indians too, the majority of which are poor and marginalised.