Rather than cut the budget of the Malaysia Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) by half, DAP parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang has called for the National Civics Bureau (BTN) to be abolished if it continues to remain ‘unrepentant, negative and divisive’.

Lim, who is also Gelang Patah MP, said Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was being unsympathetic to the democratic and human rights of Malaysians when he cut the 2016 budget for Suhakam from over RM10 million this year to RM5.5 million next year.

This compared to BTN's budget of RM50 million for 2016.

The veteran DAP leader noted that even the G25, a grouping of former top Malay civil servants, has condemned BTN of being ‘ultra Malay-racist’.

"The unrepentant, recalcitrant and anti-national mindset of BTN was again illustrated by the BTN director Raja Arif Raja Ali's defence of the derogatory reference term for the minorities in the country as pendatang when some of them may have been in Malaysia for several generations," he said.

Lim said what made Raja Arif's defence of the derogatory reference of the term pendatang all the more outrageous and inexcusable was that it came in the face of Najib trying to assure the Chines and Indians that they were the ‘sons of Malaysia’.

The Gelang Patah MP also asked whether the cabinet will censure Raja Arif for justifying the use of the derogatory term pendatang on the Chinese and Indians.