I refer to Mustapha Ong's heartfelt appeal of patience to allow equal rights to naturally evolve in Malaysia. While his letter is correct in tone and spirit in the exhortation of harmony, it is a little warped when it confuses racism with equal opportunities.

An example is Ong's pointing to other countries where racism is practised. He reports this occurrence even in developed countries such as the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

This point of comparison weakens his appeal because he is confusing covert, attitudinal racism - and marginal too at that - with institutionalised discrimination in Malaysia in the form of the

abused outcomes of the NEP. The NEP is upheld for the rich and not the poor in Malaysia.

The NEP is a crutch that may become increasingly difficult to discard just like covert, albeit residual, racism amongst the less educated or marginalised communities in the countries he mentions. The prospect of a larger community in Malaysia that cannot come to terms with meritocracy is even more confusing and daunting.

In the countries he mentions, racists are the minority. In this country, while the NEP is purportedly not racist, it confuses and confounds to the point of being seemingly intractable from the dimensions of race and legitimate opportunity.

Here, race is a major independent variable that is legalised to manipulate educational, business and political outcomes. Even in India where he alludes to the occurrence of racism, they have a minority Tamil-Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister and a Tamil finance minister in a country of one billion people where Hindi is the national language and their constitution a mere 57 years old.

I think Mustapha Ong would do well in placing levels of pertinence amongst the comparable dimensions of legal, business, educational and political life in his referent countries.