COMMENT Like a recurring malignancy, the Interlok issue just won't go away.

Last week Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin thought that he had succeeded in consigning it to a backburner by assuring that the novel would be purged of terms deemed offensive to Indian Malaysians and thereby retained as a text for study in schools.

By dint of cosmetic amendments, he felt he could muzzle BN's in-house critics - like the MIC - of the choice of the novel as a literary text for Form Five students.

This week he discovers that Chinese NGOs have banded together to demand the novel's retraction because of elements seen as scurrilous to Chinese Malaysians...