Tenth Year @KITA-UKM

By Prof Datuk Dr Denison Jayasooria Malaysian Indians have voted for multi-racial political parties to represent them in parliament based on GE14 results. This show a major departure from the traditional approach of race based political party representation. In the post GE14 parliament there would be 16 elected Indian members of parliament. This is larger than the 2013 figure of eleven. Of the sixteen (see enclosed table) only two are from the ethnic based party of the Malaysian Indian Congress   (MIC) which is part of the Barisan National (BN) coalition. In this GE14, both the MIC President and the Deputy President failed to secure a seat, as it happened in the 2008 general elections. The other thirteen members of parliament are from two political parties in the the Pakatan Harappan (PH) coalition which has now become the new federal government. There are seven elected members from the DAP and seven from PKR. What is also significant is, that many of them won with ve

By Prof Datuk Dr Denison Jayasooria Introduction There has been intense campaigning to capture the Indian votes. The days before dissolution of Parliament we saw both the BN and PH having intensive discussions with Indian groups. We noted that Dato Seri Najib was at many Indian based activities pertaining to Tamil schools, citizenship granting, micro credit as well as special grants to NGOs to run grassroot programs. More recently BN distributed calendars to Indian voters. We also saw the PH chairman Tun Mahathir meeting up with Hindraf leaders and concerned groups to ensure Indian support in GE14. Some refer to Malaysian Indians as potential kingmakers. While the Indian community is a minority the general belief is that in GE 12 the Indian voters played a major role in this shift away from the BN. This was further consolidated in GE13. There is now another opportunity to see how this minority community will vote and who will be their representatives in Parliament a