DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang used the occasion of the launch of the book, ‘Tragic Orphans’, in Petaling Jaya yesterday to commiserate on the decline in the currency of the term ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ and all that implies for the future of the country.

Speaking to about 100 people who attended the launch, an audience comprising party stalwarts, current and former MPs, ex-judges and members of the public with an affinity for the written word, the veteran parliamentarian said:

“This book is timely for it is the most eloquent testimony of the failure of Vision 2020 of a Bangsa Malaysia.”

‘Tragic Orphans’ is a work of history by Dr Carl Vadivella Belle ( left ), an Indologist from Australia, who has researched the plight of Indians in Malaya and its successor polity, Malaysia, to produce a book that portrays the community as ‘forgotten’ building blocks of its prosperity.

Kit Siang said the term ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ has become a “dirty term or unsanctioned aspiration”.

He said present-day decline in the term’s currency, a phrase coined in the early 1990s to project the aspiration to attain economic prosperity with equity and national unity, pointed up the tragedy of the country’s unfulfilled goals.

He said the evanescence of ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ as a coinage employed in political discourse mirrored deepening divisions within the country.

He said he disagreed with the view that political debate in Malaysia is shaped by race which the opinion of the author of ‘Tragic Orphans’.

“It is even worse than that,” opined Kit Siang, “for debate in Malaysia is distorted by race - by issues which have nothing to do with ethnicity.”

Kit Siang said the ongoing controversy over Agriculture Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s urging to Malays to boycott Chinese traders over unfair prices reflected the absurd distortions the obsession with race wrought in Malaysian society.

He said Ismail claimed there was nothing wrong with his urging but all was wrong with the “racially slanted reactions” to it.

He said the contributions of Indian Malaysians to the history of this country “cannot be denied” whether these be in plantation agriculture or infrastructural development of roads and railways.

‘Stirring the conscience of Malaysians’

Also speaking at the same launch, DAP national vice-chair M Kulasegaran proffered the view that ‘Tragic Orphans’ would become the “literary equivalent of the Hindraf march of late November 2007”.

He said the march galvanised Malaysian voters to a denial of the ruling BN’s supermajority in Parliament.

The lawyer-parliamentarian said the current woes of the community, which lags behind on all the indices of community well-being, can be traced to the depiction of its sorry saga in ‘Tragic Orphans’.

He hoped the book would stir the conscience of Malaysians to strive for progress with equity, which he said was the only durable solution to the Indian community’s and the nation’s problems.