I feel relieved just now as a Malaysian Indian. Indians merely resorted to a defiant public demonstration on Nov 25. For some time now I have had nightmare visions of expressions of discontent worse than this. To help us understand our defiance, I need to place on record, in the briefest possible way the story of my people in my country, Malaysia.

Some four score and twenty years ago, the indentured Indian labourer made his appearance in British Malaya. Pax Britannica ruled the waves then. Dissent in the Age of Empire? We were poor, we were ignorant and we were easily deceived but surely we were not insane. Some of us came voluntarily, a few by the allure of fortune but by far and large we came because we were 'recruited'. Now 'recruited' is a strange word. It begs an explanation.

A hundred years ago, long before the advent of talent scouts and human resources consultants, we Indians were headhunted! It is a singular honour. Our talents made us the 'preferred indentured labourer of choice'. If only we could take glory in this fact. But alas! It was not to be and instead our heads are on the chopping block in the name of "unity, progress and national development".

You must recall a hundred years ago, the Irish and the Welsh, impoverished and exploited as they were in the Home Isles would have in all probability refused any offers to work in British Malaya, headhunted or otherwise, as field workers and rubber tappers. By a strange twist of logic the Irish preferred death by the thousands in the Empire's various colonial wars. And the Welsh, the slower death of the coal-mines. Perhaps they were both prescient. Who could foretell the horrors of a scarcely developed tropical land so far from home? What of suffering pestilence and 'fevers' without the comfort of dear and near ones?' What of worship and succour of the Divine as they saw Him?; What of a journey across a great ocean with the ever present risk of a watery grave? What of, God forbid, institutionalised discrimination by the powers - that - be? No, not us said the Irish and the Welsh.

'An eye for an eye'

Other Europeans and Jews, equally destitute fled to the sweatshops, factories, railroads and construction sites of America. Imagine, if instead, they had come over here? The Afro-Americans liberated from the slavery of the Southern Plantations...How about them as tappers and field workers in British Malaya? "No Siree, once bitten, twice shy," they said and preferred the racist discrimination of White America. Some began to cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction, 'returning home' to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Why not the Arabs? Broken, beggared and dirt-poor after the Mongol predations of Hulagu, the Arab sat patiently on his haunches for some six hundred years bereft of both effort and progress. In this long twilight he skirmished and he fought endlessly with the Turk, the European, the Jew and of course his fellow Arabs in the time honoured fashion of "an eye for an eye", and "a tooth for a tooth". Perhaps he too was prescient in not turning up on our shores as rubber tappers and field workers. Mind you, the weather would have suited him!

The Han Chinese, persecuted and pig-tailed were in all but name a subject people of the ruling Manchus. In less than 300 years of vain-glorious rule the Manchus had reduced the glory that was Chinese civilization to an orgy of opium and oppression. Restive and rebellious, the Chinese escaped their oppressors and fled to Nan Yang, the lands of the Southern Seas with dreams of fortune, adventure and prodigal return. Imperial power-sponsored recruitment (that word again!) and wage-slavery in the plantations of the Southern Seas was not for them. Clever fellas, they!

Come the hour, Come the Race - the moment of the indentured Indian labourer had come! They came, all smartly organised by British mercantile interests in converted and crowded old cargo steamships, landing in the old Straits Settlements ports of Penang, Singapore and Malacca.

Standing dazed and rubber-legged on decrepit old docks and piers they were herded towards the hinterlands and interior of a far-flung outpost of the Empire. British Malaya was poor and a raw colony barring its tin-mines. There was neither law nor order. On the docks many of these Indians shell-shocked and listless would look to the skies in divine supplication and perhaps to also ascertain the position of the sun to know the general direction of west from where they had come. Ah, the ironies of life - a hundred years on and now we look west again, for salvation denied to us in the land of our birth.

And so we came. First in a trickle, then a flood. Not seeking the riches of a land but to enrich it. Malaria-infested swamps were drained, forests cleared, hills terraced, fields delineated, and the seeds of a global and burgeoning industry called rubber were sowed. In the fullness of time, the land gave to its heirs and successors its manyfold bounties, many times over. First King Rubber, then King Oil palm.

On almost every estate of Synergy Drive, today's plantation giant, the blood, the sweat and tears of Indians lays buried if not Indians themselves. Synergy Drive may well become, if properly managed, the darling of our stock market but to the Indian, it is the ogre of our sacrificial and unappreciated past. Perhaps it is so, because we were 'recruited' artfully. Nothing sinister on our part. As the story now goes, we should seek redress, air our grievances and point all our questions at the heirs and successors of the British Empire. Why so? As a sovereign people we should have a national conscience. Is that too much to ask of MIC and the Barisan Nasional? We forge a national consensus when we have haven't the faintest trace of conscience?

Talents of Indians

But I must stick to this brief history of my people. Brother, remember we were headhunted and 'recruited' because we had talent. Boy, did we have TALENT! And of our many talents, one looms large. It is the talent for self-deception. We had deceived ourselves then as now, that we could prosper without full political rights; that the tilted playing field of the NEP never would result in the tables being turned on us; that mere effort without access to government and higher education could make us economically prosperous and socially progressive or that the younger sibling would be disinherited and be turned away from the sumptuous dinner table of his two elder siblings, post - Merdeka. But all that came later. Our other talents need a brief mention; loyal, law abiding, peaceful and peaceable, amenable to compromise even at the detriment of our own interests, gullible and prone to believing future promises and the like.

And so we slaved on the roads, on the rails, on the plantations, on vast public works and in all ranks of the Civil Service which of course includes the Police Force and the Armed Services. We had learnt to become the proverbial hewers of wood and carriers of water par excellence. At the end of these long days of toil and application we sought solace and repentance for the Karma of our pass lives in the little temples that dot this land and which so aptly reflect our current political and economic status - small, dispersed and of no consequence. Now even these little temples are being knocked down denying the denizens of squatter settlements what little solace they are entitled to.

At this level of existence the little temple is not about religion. It is about hope. It is also about the Rukun Negara - without a temple how can we subscribe to its first tenet : Belief in God. Hence the overwhelming sense of hopelessness when one more temple is destroyed. Is there no remorse, no repentance and no gracefulness in this supposed land of milk and honey?

Yes! Yes! Yes! The lifes of the poor of all races is a hard one. But should we be hardened even further by being systematically marginalised given all that we have given. Should we be punished so severely for the weaknesses and 'talents' of our forefathers? Memories crowd my mind, my feelings and my being. Merdeka and 1957 was the promise of a glorious new era for my people. "Out with exploitation" and "Out with an Empire that had made us suffer so grievously as indentured labour". On 31st August 1957, the long night of our nightmares had broken into a bright hopeful dawn of new beginnings with the 3 reverberating cries of Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka!

I was but three years old then. Given all the pain of my 53 years, the famous reverberating three shouts now more and more seem like a taunt. For whom was my good father shouting for so lustily on that fateful morn, if not for me? And for whom should I shout Merdeka for if not for my children? Should you blame me for feeling suicidal, politically speaking. To save myself, I should begin now to believe that Merdeka does not mean Independence. I think it means Freedom. All that remains for me to do is to break-free from the shackles of a painful past and an unjust present. This coming general elections, the Indian in Malaysia has an historic opportunity. Don't Vote. Every Indian. Go stuff your ballot box!

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

MURALE PILLAI is 53 years old and was an ex-planter with the Sime Darby Group from 1979-1992. He now runs his own company.