That Hindraf managed to mobilise tens of thousands of disgruntled Indian Malaysians for the rally right in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, by any measure, a resounding victory for the organisation. It is a tough act to follow for any opposition party or NGO in Malaysia.

Ostensibly to present a memorandum to the British High Commission with a view to seek apologies and reparations for the indenture system under which hundreds of thousands of Indian labourers in Tamil Nadu were brought to the then British Malaya. Their real objective was perhaps to shame the Malaysian government internationally.

After all, Britain has never apologised or compensated any nation or group of people for its imperial past, despite the overwhelming evidence of colonialism being exploitative and racist. In drawing up a balance sheet of colonialism, the bad far outweighed the good.

Moreover, at the United Nations Conference Against Racism in 2001, the Labour government of Tony Blair successfully persuaded the European Union not to issue a straightforward apology for the Transatlantic slave trade, thereby thwarting the effort by the Africans to force the Europeans to acknowledge specific responsibility.

Had Blair failed, the world could have been seeing lawsuits launched by former colonies against their erstwhile suzerains: Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, not to mention the pressure for Japan and Russia to apologise to their former colonial possessions in Asia and the Far East. It might also call into question the annexation of Tibet by China as to whether it, too, amounted to racism.

(Although London has been consistently refusing to utter a word of apology, there were occasions when the British did own up to their administrative injustices, such as the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. More notably, Queen Elizabeth II signed a New Zealand Act of Parliament in 1995 and apologised to the indigenous Maoris for the land confiscation by British settlers in the 1860s.)

International attention

Given the odds against them, I honestly believe the Indians' real intention was to seek international attention on their predicament under the Barisan Nasional government. Unfortunately, the rightwing and royalist Daily Telegraph has exemplified the worst of British journalism through selective reporting on the incident when it chose not to highlight that the Indian Malaysians were also demanding an apology from London.

Since the credibility of the BN government was at stake, one should really not be surprised to see the super-efficient deployment of the FRU trucks and police motorbikes around KL. There was no safer and better time to walk late in the night in the capital than those few days, and there must have been dramatic drops in crime rates around the Klang Valley. Quite clearly, whether or not our police force can actually ensure public security is a matter of will, not capacity.

S Samy Vellu, president of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) who insists on his party's sole right to represent the Indian community in this country, has never been so humiliated in his political career, while his Chinese counterpart in the government - Ong Ka Ting of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) must be feeling so quietly uneasy too. But I would assure him that the Chinese, however marginalised they perceive themselves to be, are yet to be hard-pressed and pent-up enough to take to the streets.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi may have lost some sleep, or he may have not.

Still, for a government that just spent billions on celebrating 50 years of "independence" and "nationhood" with much fanfare and pomp, the rage of the Indians in the form of mass protest does not bode well at all. Umno and the MIC may continue to bury their heads in the sand, the world has however seen the poor lot who are left far behind in the country's drive to "modernise".

Again, Nazri Abdul Aziz, minister in the prime minister's department and always the first to declare his undying loyalty to the government, did not disappoint me. He said he stood by the two million Indian Malaysians who did not take part in the rally last Sunday, and accused those who did of being " penyangak " (crooks). I guess he should go back to school to relearn, in addition to legal principles, a bit of the nation's history that not all Malays came out in protest of British rule in the 1940s, but most of them did feel the negative impact of colonialism.

Is it feasible?

Having said that, is it feasible to seek compensation from the British government after 50 years? Even if it is, it would be a lengthy and tortuous process of identifying who really are the descendants of indentured plantation workers. To establish that the British are responsible for the plight of the Indian community in Malaysia today, a comparison must be made before and after 1957.

For instance, the number of Tamil schools was in proportion to the Tamil population during the British administration, while under Umno, more and more Tamil kids are forced into a same compound as the government refuses to cater to their need for more schools. The conditions of the Tamil schools across the country are appalling, and the classes overcrowded.

Not to justify colonial rule of any kind, I suppose the proportion of Indian civil servants in British Malaya was higher than it is the case today, when Indians only make up no more than 3% of the police force.

Many Indian students eligible for medical studies are given courses that are not of their choice, but who is to blame? The British? Or the BN? I know of several Indian parents who sent their young ones to study medicines at the Crimea State Medical University in Ukraine, only to be told by the government that their qualifications would not be recognized at home.

It does not take a genius to know education is crucial for any community to be upwardly mobile, and the neglect of the BN government, coupled with the race-based policy of Umno, has been the root cause behind all kinds of social ills among the Indians. Last year, G Palanivel, Deputy Minister for Women, Family and Community Development, revealed that 30 to 35 Indian Malaysians per 100,000 committed or attempted suicide annually, thrice the number of Malaysians of other ethnicity.

Racial profiling

Umno politicians love to cite T Ananda Krishnan as a success story under a "fair-minded" government, but are piqued when told that more than half of Malaysia's Indian population still lives in poverty and that Indian students have the highest dropout rates of any ethnic group in the country. With such shocking and sorrowful statistics, it does make me wonder why it has taken the Indians so long to voice out their grouses in anger.

Just last week, I happened to be in a bank when the windscreen of a car parked outside was smashed. When a man rushed in to report it to the security guards, the same question came out of the mouths of several people: Orang India ke?

No one squirmed at hearing this, and I was furious. Since when has racial profiling in crime become acceptable? It may be common in other countries too, but it is perhaps at its ugliest in Malaysia. We live in a land where the ruling coalition is constantly seeking to cripple our ability to think. Come across any problem? Just race-stereotype it and all the real causes vanish.

But most Malaysians are probably unaware that the Indians are among the most prosperous communities in the United States and Britain, and there must be a reason why our Tamil brethren cannot make it in Malaysia. The message sent through the extraordinarily successful rally last Sunday was too loud and too clear to fall on deaf ears.

As always, the spirit of reason must prevail despite the lingering euphoria. The onus is now on every concerned citizen and group to tie the appeals of the Indians into the expectations and demands of other Malaysians so as to de-racialise and de-religionise the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Hindraf leaders must do more to convince the public that they are not doing this with a vengeance, but are ready to walk and fight alongside just-minded Malaysians of all ethnicity, failing which they will only play into the hands of the ruling coalition and show themselves to be a fringe group of ethnic fanatics bent on havoc and destruction. Should this be the case, my Indian friends will again end up the ultimate losers in a conspiracy brilliantly executed by extremists of all sides.