I refer to the Malaysiakini report Subra: New plans show Indians not marginalised .

The relative deprivation of the Indians has had always been in negative and with the sub-division of estates which affected the livelihood of thousands of plantation workers who migrated to the towns and cities where their economic status stood next to just survival.

As a social activist, I used to follow my colleague Irene Xavier to Kampung Muniandy, Lindungan, Railway and Ghandi on the fringes of the capital’s urban centres, which are the slums of Kuala Lumpur .

Let has not take an academic outlook of the prevailing scenario but a generalist’s view.

Petrol and transportation prices have increased along with the prices for basic necessities such as rice, cooking oil, vegetables, fish and chicken.

What would the MIC’s imagination be of the kind of meals an Indian family in Kampung Lindungan would have if there were five children and the sole breadwinner is the man of the house with hardly RM1,200 a month?

Obviously, a glass of wine in one of the prominent Indian pubs in Kuala Lumpur - namely Chakravarti - may cost more than the meal for seven people in a family in this sub-urban fringe. What could they be eating everyday except rice and dhall curry with some fried ikan bilis .

I will give you a personal example. One of my friends ( I do not want mention the name) recently passed away in the area of Taman Sentosa. Old Klang Road. He was fifty years old.

He had four children and all of them were schooling and a wife who was and is now a housewife. He did all kinds of jobs above his routine job as a driver to make ends meet. He would return home after work at 2 am and leave again at 5 am.

He was a wonderful and a very hard-working person who suddenly died of high stress which led to a heart attack. His family is now in a limbo.

Do we have social security for the children and the wife? There are thousands of such Indians family in the same situation. What has the MIC or Dr S Subramaniam done other than making statements?

An academic may call this relative deprivation and may compare this situation with the slums in Mumbai and Manila and give a positive spin on the slum-dwelling ratio in Kuala Lumpur .

But our job here today is not to compare the relative deprivation of Indians with the Malays or the Chinese. This kind of analysis will only lead one to an unethical economic ratio of racial deprivation.

The is BN’s bigotry and not sensible and rational economics. We in PKR do not even think about such kind of ‘immoral and uncouth’ projections. We do not want to think of poverty by race and religion. We want to eradicate poverty across every race and religion or creed.

To my humble view, Dr S Subramaniam has lost touch with society and lacks analytical thinking of the Indians socio-economic perspective and their future. They have never been able to understand the plight of the problems put forward by Makkal Sakthi.

Society by nature is progressive and not static. While Anwar Ibrahim as ‘Sivaji the Boss’ is going around the country, getting the support of Indians for the future of Indians, Malays, Chinese, Kadazans, Dayaks and all others as Malaysians, the MIC is involved in dragging the Indians backwards for its leaders’ own selfish goals.

Indians must realise that Dr S Subramaniam’s statement is nothing but a selfish reiteration of MIC’s decadent political ideals.

He has failed to realise that the socio-economic situation of Indians in this country has not changed and the society needs to integrate for the future rather than being dragged backward into retrogressive decadence.