The MIC president, S Samy Vellu, who recently sued a Tamil newspaper, Malaysia Nanban , for RM100 million for suggesting he did not lobby hard for a second Indian cabinet minister, faces an intractable dilemma: how the moribund MIC could continue as the only representative of the Indian community in the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition.

He did not get the second cabinet post nor the new Indian deputy minister's post which went instead to M Kayveas of the People's Progressive Front.

In his 23 years at the party's helm, Samy is reduced to irrelevance in national life, an underclass for which he must take singular responsibility. Long on promises and short on any measures to improve Indians' irrelevance in Malaysian society, his MIC has given up the ghost but continues the tired refrain of the Indian community as an important component of BN.

But is it?

There are now three contending power centres for the Indians in BN: MIC, PPP and Indian Progressive Front. MG Pandithan says his IPF cannot be in BN because the coalition's security guard - Samy Vellu - bars its entry. But Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, and others, regard the IPF as an important Indian vote-getter for BN. He wrote the foreword to the IPF's conference magazine on Sunday, and the deputy prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, opened it.

The Indian underclass

Pandithan's IPF represents the underclass of Indian society, claims a membership of 500,000 - a solid vote bank for anyone he decrees it should be. (One should not take these membership claims seriously: The Indians in MIC, PPP, IPF add up to more than their number in Malaysia! This is not confined to Indians; the Malay and Chinese political parties also exaggerate their membership.)

Samy Vellu was, and is, frightened of its reach and Pandithan's within it, and had him expelled when he was the party's vice-president a decade ago. After briefly flirting with the opposition, he committed the IPF to BN although the MIC barred its formal membership.

The IPF is in the news lately, with MIC and PPP wanting its members but not Pandithan. Both misunderstood, if not miscalculated, ground realities. Pandithan appears to vacillate but he understood this better than the other two. He pitches his men to BN leaders-to-come so that IPF, not MIC or PPP, represents Indian interests in the government. Given the vacuous leadership in both, this is not a pipe dream.

How strong is Pandithan and his forces? He can bring out the votes more efficaciously than the MIC. PPP is a flyweight in the political wind, projecting its future on the long-forgotten heroes of its past. It is an irrelevance in BN. Pandithan wanted his IPF in PPP to come into the ruling coalition in what the corporate world would call a reverse takeover. What holds him back is his inability to rise above his disabilities to that of a leader of Indians.

But he made fools of both Samy Vellu and Kayveas. They would not formally invite him, Samy even demanding Pandithan should accept his good faith in wanting IPF in MIC. A press conference call, in his view, is good enough; a gentleman's agreement need not be in writing. Kayveas jumped into the fray and got burnt. Pandithan knows he is powerful but his miscalculations in the past two decades caused him and his community plenty.

Twice disabled

The Indian underclass is disabled twice over: at the bottom of the economic and cultural totem poles. Pandithan's IPF represents this underclass with its twin almost insurmountable disabilities. However much Indians might decry the role of caste in Indian society in Malaysia, it is there, large as life in one's social life. In one sense, its reach is more pernicious than in India.

Few educated Indians from this group openly support IPF; they do not want to be marginalised on account of their caste or attract attention to it. The MIC's failure, which IPF attacks, accentuated when it nurtured the vote bank of this important subset but did not even attempt to improve their economic status.

Those Indian labourers are left to their own devices as they are driven out when the estates they worked for are sold. The downside of Putrajaya is the tens of hundreds of workers, mostly Indian, driven out when the land was acquired.

But the worm turns. As education, fitful as it is, comes to this group, they are emboldened to demand their rights. MIC ignored it. IPF did not. Which is why both the prime minister and deputy prime minister want it to continue to back BN even if the BN's "security guard", in the form of Samy Vellu, is abhorrent to it.

But IPF would not get to join BN yet: When you can get its support without being in it, there would be no special allowances for Pandithan. But then his members are accustomed to playing that role.