Ethnic Row: ‘Release Indian-origin Malaysian MP’

The five activists are being held in a detention centre in northern Malaysia under a colonial-era law that provides for indefinite detention without charge or trial. Manoharan was running on the Chinese-backed Democratic Action Party ticket.

The Court of Appeals is due to rule on his case on April 2, but his wife, Pushpaneela, 46, hopes he will be released before then.

“People have voted for him and he should be released immediately,” the mother of four said on Thursday.

“Someone told me the (national police chief) has said if the federal government says Manoharan is to be released then he has no objection. The PM has the final say. I appeal to the PM that my husband should be released immediately.”

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s press secretary Azhar Othman said ‘no decision has been made’ regarding Manoharan’s case and acknowledged that having an elected MP sitting in an ISA detention camp was a predicament.

“Yes, it is a problem. But there are more pressing issues right now,” he said.

He was referring to the fact that Abdullah has a caretaker government while he puts together a new, slimmed down cabinet following the weekend’s election debacle for his Malay-dominated National Front coalition.

Indians and Chinese, complaining of political and judicial corruption and cronyism, racial and religious divisiveness and declining economic power, voted in unprecedented numbers for opposition parties in Saturday’s general elections.

Pushpaneela, who started off practically along on a quixotic election campaign for her detained husband, said she was amazed at the outpouring of support from other races.

“This election was something different, where I did it with a lot of ‘people power’.

“I was really surprised when this group of Chinese came to me and said they wanted change. Too much corruption, they said, too much crime; children raped and murdered and until now cannot find the killers. Prices are increasing, petrol, wheat flour, sugar, oil, everything they’re hiking. How are poor people to manage?”

She met her husband on Sunday, the day after general elections that saw the National Front lose its two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time in four decades and the Opposition take control of an unprecedented five states.

“He was overjoyed. He’s very excited, and he says wants to meet the people of Kota Alam Shah, but they have locked him up.”

The population of Kota Alam Shah, a town outside Kuala Lumpur is almost 60 per cent Chinese and 23 per cent Indian.

In 2007, the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) stunned the government by bringing more than 10,000 ethnic Indians onto the streets of the capital to complain of racial discrimination against Indians, who make up about 7 per cent of the population.

The Indian rally, though peaceful, aroused deep concerns within the government, and also among many ordinary Malaysians, because of the country’s history of tense and sometimes explosively violent race relations.